This episode explores the pitfalls of valorizing participation as a democratic end in itself. How might a one-sided emphasis on participatory politics be instrumentalized by elite interests? And does simply getting more people involved in decision-making truly advance democratic ideals? Listen to hear why democracies should focus more on resistance to state capture.
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: scopeaudio
Follow us on social media!
• Central European University: @weareceu.bsky.social
• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @ahcdemocracy.bsky.social
• Samuel Bagg: @samuel-bagg.bsky.social
Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, rector and president of the Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the eighth episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. I'm very pleased to welcome today Samuel Ely Bagg, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. Sam's research in his own words and let me quote him here: “seeks to reimagine democratic ideals and practices in light of realistic assumptions about the dynamics of social inequality and political power.” He's published articles in Politics and Society, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory, and the American Political Science Review. His writings focus on a range of topics from the outline of his practice-oriented approach to related questions of democratic theory or his research in political psychology, behavior and political institutions.
Last year, he published the highly acclaimed book, “The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy”[i]at the Oxford University Press, and that book is going to be the focus of our conversation today. The podcast has since its very beginning confronted and possibly also tried to answer some urgent questions of why so many taken for granted assumptions about democracy have increasingly come under attack of late in so many countries. Sam's book begins by acknowledging these very challenges that democracies around the world are facing. So, I'm eager to have him address some of the key implications of the theoretical arguments and normative claims that he puts forward in the dispersion of power.
The main premise of the book is that the ideal of democracy as collective self-rule modeled on deliberative decision making by equal individuals is a flawed one, at least in practical terms, even if it has undeniable appeal as an abstract ideal. So, I'll begin by asking him to explain why he thinks this is a flawed premise, and also to relate the pitfalls of collectively exercised direct democracy to demagogic anti-elitist manipulation.
I'll then discuss with him his alternative model of democracy conceived primarily in negative terms as what he calls resistance to state capture. What do democratic theorists and reformers risk if they neglect or even ignore the highly skewed and uneven distribution of power and resources among competing groups in our societies?
Can the liberal ideal of state neutrality adequately cope with the historically accumulated and sedimented imbalances of wealth, power and influence? Or do we need instead, in some context, what Sam has called “corrective partiality” to redress these imbalances and prevent the capture of public interest by privileged social groups.
What are the minimal demands of genuine democracy besides the familiar liberal triad of constitutionalism, competitionand universalism? What are some of the key dilemmas facing both ordinary citizens and intellectuals when we envision counterhegemonic mobilization, and what are the political preconditions of this dispersion of power?
These are some of the questions that we'll address together in today's episode of Democracy in Question. Sam, welcome to the podcast and it's a great pleasure to have you with me today. Thanks so much for joining me.
Samuel Bagg (SB): It's a great pleasure to be here. Thanks for that really wonderful, generous introduction.
SR: Today when so many people are increasingly becoming frustrated with existing institutions and opaque power structures, I think it's time to ask some fundamental questions of the kind that you've been asking. Many of these people seem to gravitate towards ideals of collective self-rule reflected in the renewed interest we are seeing in many parts of the world, in experiments, in grassroots deliberation and direct democracy. Many democratic reformers and theorists, as you put it: “Treat processes of collective will formation and decision making as the primary object of democratic concern.” However, you've argued against obsessing over how to make more decisions collectively. The risk you point to is that if you subordinate everything to the imperative of making sure that every member of society has an equal say in collective decision making, we may end up with a model of democracy that privileges procedure and participation, but it'll do so at the expense of substantive policies. Moreover, as you argued, this focus on what you call individualized input into collective decision-making procedures often confuses the method of collective deliberation with what should be our concern for the actual goals of democracy. So let me ask you if your main critique here is that this obsession with procedure, with participation with methods of deliberation, that these substitute in a way, the means for the ends, while ignoring real conflicts of interest that shape our societies.
SB: Yes. I think you've summarized that really well. I haven't thought about it that way before, but the idea that it's substituting the means for the ends really resonates. The means in this case being decision-making, broad participation processes of collective will formation and deliberation. I don't want to say that participation as such is bad. I think in order to improve democracy we have to have more widespread broad participation. But what I think goes wrong with a lot of approaches that I criticize in the book is that participation is valorized as a good in itself regardless of what ends it serves. And I think there are a lot of contexts where broadening participation undermines other democratic practices or institutions and actually serves elite interests even perhaps better than institutions that are less inclusive. So, participation, yes, but it has to be very specific forms of participation that are structured in ways that are actually likely to advance the interests of ordinary people and of disempowered groups.
And the default we should assume is that if there is some innovation that is including more people we should be skeptical. Most of the time, they're going to be structured, designed in ways that favor elite interest. That's why they're becoming, that's why they're gaining traction in the first place.
So, we have to be very careful about what sorts of participatory institutions we embrace. And because we need more participation. We need ordinary people to be more actively involved. Otherwise, you don't get anywhere with advancing democratic ends. But so many of the ways that we've done so in the past have either started out co-opted or have become co-opted along the way. And I think the real challenge is to say not whether participation, but what forms, and to be really careful about that.
SR: So, could you give an example of the kinds of participation that you are worried broadening that participation would lead to elite capture?
SB: There are lots of different versions that have lots of different effects, but a classic example here would be local participatory institutions on things like say school boards or zoning commissions or environmental protection, where what you really have is the people who have the time and the resources to inform themselves and get organized and show up.
They're the ones who end up participating. You know, the polluting factory never gets built in the rich white neighborhood. It gets built in the poor minority neighborhood instead where they didn't get organized in time to stop it. And there's a lot of emphasis now recently on ideas about random selection for participation to eliminate that sort of selection bias. And I think that can go some of the way towards solving these problems. But even in those cases, they still hide the way that elites are still able to determine the agenda and the structure and the, you know, who is selected as experts and what sort of information people are given, and that can really determine the outcomes. Even if the sort of participants are a representative sample of the population and the off chance that people actually do something the elites don't expect, they'll often still be able to cut the cord on these institutions, which is exactly what happened with one of the more famous examples of these citizens assemblies, the Citizens Convention for the Climate that Emmanuel Macron started in France basically as a response to this popular upsurge in the gilets jaunes movement. He thought he could control them, and it turns out he couldn't. In the end, he was able to pull the rug from the radical recommendations that they came up with.
So, when it serves elite interests, they're happy to provide this kind of illusion of choice. And, you know, democraticity, I guess. And then otherwise never mind. We never meant all that stuff in the beginning.
SR: So let me quote what you say in an interview to further this argument: “Part of the reason people feel so despairing and disappointed is their expectations are set by this fantasy of collective self-rule, which is never going to be achieved. People have an idea that public policy should reflect their individual views, and that if they don't feel that way, then it's not really a democracy.” Such frustrations, as you just suggested, can be easily harnessed by populace that mobilizes the kind of resentment that this disillusionment fosters to undermine democracy even more. And as you've argued, this illusory promise of collective self-rule can be and has been often also invoked by autocrats as well as contemporary soft authoritarians to stifle dissent and to justify anti-democratic measures. Could advocates of collective self-rule then unwittingly be playing into the hands of authoritarian forces, and if they want to guard themselves against this kind of misuse of participation, what are the kinds of things they could be doing?
SB: I should say, any ideal can be abused, and I don't want to say this is the only one that could play into authoritarian hands or that, the way I think about democracy couldn't also be abused. That's certainly the case.
But I think there's something about this logic of popular authorization that does lend itself particularly well to authoritarian causes. The sense that democracy is ultimately about doing what the people want, leads you to think, well, you know, what's the point of all this gridlock, all these checks and balances, all these protections, they're just clogging up the system, preventing me, the leader say who knows what the people want from, from doing it, as if there were such a thing as the people or a particular thing that they want.
I think no self-respecting democratic theorist today would actually support those kinds of authoritarian claims. Not today. Back in the day, there were many very smart philosophers, legal theorists who made those kinds of arguments. Carl Schmitt comes to mind, and unfortunately there's some people today in my country who are trying to bring something like that back when defending all the president's executive orders. He won the popular vote, therefore, this is what the people want. Therefore, you can take your rule of law and shove it. I wouldn't call those people self-respecting democratic theorists, but they're claiming the mantle of collective self-rule in order to justify dismantling everything that's valuable and actually democratic, I think about our government.
But I mean, that's essentially the logic. People voted for this, therefore it's legitimate. And I happen to think that's a crazy thing to think it's wrong on so many levels, but if democracy is about collective self-rule, popular sovereignty, it's actually a very natural, very logical thing to think. In a way you have to talk yourself in circles to get around that conclusion. And, of course people do. Democratic theorists are very clever these days. They come up with lots of stories to explain why in fact the will of the people is actually best realized through this or that complex set of checks and balances, bureaucratic institutions, meritocratic standards, legal formalities.
I can't sit here and tell you that every single one of these stories is false. Some of them might be plausible, but it seems to me that there's a simpler answer. Democracy isn't actually about collective self-rule, because that's a mirage, a fantasy. There isn't any good way to define the people or figure out what they really want when it comes to all the hundreds, thousands, even millions of things, depending on how you count that modern states at least do every day. And even if there were a way to find that out, I don't think it would be the final word on democracy, whatever people happen to think and whatever way we've chosen to measure it today, that's not always a good reflection of what their interests are, much less what our real collective public interests are.
So, I think that the idea that we can just defer to the people or what the people want is kind of a cop out. And so, we really need to think harder about what it means to have a system that is organized to pursue general, collective public interests.
SR: So, the argument that you're making is imparted by focusing primarily on how decisions are made. Many democratic reformers and theorists downplay or at least neglect underlying power structures and relations. So the democratic ideal of collective self-rule as an abstract ideal is fine, but it could at best, only compliment your own alternative ideal of democracy, and that's what I want to turn to, namely democracy is resistance to state capture, and you focus therefore much more on a more realistic, mundane level of practice, something which gladdens my social anthropological heart, where the highly unequal distribution of power and resources determines then which groups can sway public interest to serve their own ends. So, I'd like you to elaborate on this idea of state capture as the default condition of modern states, which can never be eliminated, as you call it, and its relevance for a robust defense of democracy today. And why you think that we need to define democracy negatively, as an evolving struggle against state capture. If you could do that through a few concrete examples of the various forms through which state capture manifests itself today, and what kind of defenses can be built against it.
SB: So the way I define state capture is very broadly. Basically, that's meant to include a whole wide range of things. I define it as any time that some partial faction or group or even individual uses state power for their own partial interests at the expense of broader public interest. And when you look at it that way, it's inherently normative in the sense that it's defined in terms of the public interest.
There's always going to be people who have outsized control over the state. The real question for me is whether they're using that power in a broadly public interest or not. So it's going to depend to some extent on what you think the public interest actually is. I proceed through examples and through practical examples.
There are at least some cases that almost everybody would agree are capture, and then there are other cases that might be more difficult to determine whether it's capture or not. But so you know, in my vision, I think state capture covers everything from an instance where one individual has control over all parts of the state, a kind of personalized autocracy. That's an extreme form of state capture, and it's everything from that to kind of petty corruption by low level officials, who are using a small, tiny, little part of the state for their own good at the expense of the broader public interest and whatever it is that they're supposed to be doing without taking bribes.
And everything in between those two kinds of extremes. Regulatory capture by an industry of the regulator that's supposed to be watching them or maybe just a particular competitor at the expense of others. You can also talk about state capture by larger groups, by a particular race or a caste or an ethnic group or religion to serve the partial interest of that group. Extreme cases, something like slavery or apartheid, Jim Crow. But there's also much less extreme forms of this all the time. I think almost every society will have some version of this where a categorical group is using the state to serve their sort of partial interest at the expense of others.
The one that occupies most of my attention in the book is the group of wealthy elites. You talk about oligarchs as the very top .01 percent or just wealthy elites generally talking about the top 1 percent or 10 percent. But in all these cases however you define those groups, there are ways in which that subset has kind of captured state power and is using state power to pursue their interest at the expense of everyone else.
So, those are sort of the things that motivate the book generally the cases of capture that are important for me and things that I think we need to be concerned with. There was an op-ed in the New York Times recently talking about state capture because of the way it's been so spectacularly happening in the United States recently with President Trump profiting off of the presidency. Elon Musk obviously being the core example right now, literally firing the regulators that are supposed to be regulating his companies. I mean, in a way they're making it so obvious.
Perhaps there's something hopeful in what's been going on covertly all along. It's often these extreme examples are what's required to spark pushback. Unfortunately, that's not guaranteed. It all depends on whether they get away with it in the end.
SR: Elon Musk example, Sam, you bring me to an interesting point here, because I think you're absolutely right. I mean, what we are seeing is in your face, the wealthiest man in the world who has de facto bought himself a position of omnipotent political power and is wielding it in a manner which I think we could not have imagined would be possible just a few months ago. He's meddling, of course, openly in the domestic politics of your own country, but interestingly, he's meddling in the domestic politics, especially electorate politics of many other countries in Europe, equally openly. This is the interesting part of the state capture argument. When you're thinking about state capture, we are still thinking in nation state terms. We are thinking about a territorial entity which gets captured by a national economically powerful elite. What we are now seeing is that transnational reach and transnational ambitions in making Trumpian deals with political elites elsewhere, almost offering a bargain that if they were to let right-wing forces prevail in their own society, they could expect to get some concessions from the U.S. government. So, I think this is state capture, but beyond the state. This is a really odd kind of coup that's going on.
SB: I think I would say that the international dimension has always been a part of state capture. One of the reasons that oligarchs and people like Musk and capitalists for generations have been able to control the politics in their states, even when other forces are aligned against them, is because they can take their business elsewhere, they can take their money elsewhere. There's always this international threat of capital mobility that isn't matched by labor mobility. And that's a huge asymmetry that empowers global elites at the expense of others. Trade agreements make it difficult to take certain actions that would constrain the businesses. So, this is certainly not a new dimension that people like Musk are looking to the international sphere to entrench their power basically. And that's one of the things that basically since the beginning of capitalism has been an important part and an important source of power. But I'd venture to say probably it goes back further than that.
SR: Is there anything specific, anything new about this exercise of transnational dimension of the state capture? So yes, you could say, of course, capitalists have always used their wealth to make profits for themselves across borders. But when Vance and Musk are interfering in German or British electoral politics, I'm not sure whether it's just about profits. It's very much about shoring up certain ideological positions and they're willing to trade on those given a rather Trumpian kind of contractual thinking in the background that in order for certain kinds of right-wing ideologies gaining acceptance, the United States government would be willing to make certain concessions. So, I was thinking if there is something which is new here, this is more than just global capitalism.
SB: Perhaps what's new is that it's happening to Germany and the U.K. so openly. This was Cold War politics, I mean, in most of the rest of the world, a combination of ideological and profit driven motives for the United States intervening in the politics of other countries to ensure that the interests of the U.S. capitalists were sustained, that nobody nationalized any industries that happened to be owned by capitalists in the United States. There was an ideological element then too, some people were motivated by profit and some people were motivated by pure ideology perhaps. Elon Musk, his ideology is pretty opportunistic. You know, Vance may have a deeper commitment to the ideology itself, but it certainly serves their interests, Vance's political interests and Musk's material interests to have allied regimes in other states, that's one of the things that could potentially push back on their control over U.S. politics and their control over the regulatory regime would be if there were opposing forces in some of the other Democratic states of the world that could push back. And so, they're trying to make sure that doesn't happen.
SR: And so let me turn to another aspect of the book, drawing on the work of people like Piketty, you mentioned the unprecedented concentration of untaxed wealth and growing inequality around the world, which private law entrenches and also protects. So the channels through which the power of wealthy elites shapes our societies are, of course, complex and manifold, ranging from tax laws to ideology and culture wars, regulatory capture, ownership of media to what Varoufakis, who was a previous guest on the podcast has called Cloud Capital or Techno Feudal Rent. All of these have come together in a formidable hegemonic formation, and you are of the view, and I quote you again, that: “State capture by wealthy elites is not going anywhere. And in all likelihood, it's getting worse, and that liberal democracy is the highest form of oligarchy.” That last one was a surprise for me. Could you elaborate on the implications of this argument of yours?
SB: I think I took that quote, or maybe if it's not a quote, it's certainly the spirit of the analysis of Jeffrey Winters, who's really one of the leading, most astute analysts of the oligarchy historically cross nationally, but also, the way that that concept applies to our current moment in places like the United States.
And so in its highest form, not meaning the sort of most depraved and worst form but meaning the sort of most reliable form and the least obvious. And of course those are related. All other forms of oligarchy that have existed that Winters talks about in his wonderful book, oligarchs have to personally intervene in order to secure their wealth, whether it's through personal access to military force or personalistic favors and a clientistic system of grand corruption. You know, maybe you're seeing a return to that with Musk personally intervening to secure his wealth and so on. But that's not how it usually works in liberal democracies. Instead, oligarchs outsource wealth protection entirely or almost entirely to the state. That's the bargain. They give up some privileges and they do have to make real sacrifices in that sense, but in exchange, they actually get more secure protections anytime there are these extremely large stacks of wealth, resources other people are going to want. Some of the action that's natural.
So oligarchs are constantly going to find different ways of defending their stash. Oligarchs are the dragons sitting on piles of gold who have figured out an effective way of protecting it. And in most of history, that meant actively going out and buying military power or buying political influence, directly defending it that way.
Under liberal democracy, it means trusting the neutral liberal state to enforce property rights and the general system of private law, while of course also trying to manipulate policy in as favorable a direction as possible. As we just talked also making exit plans, diversifying globally, just in case this democratic system backfires but usually it doesn't.
The basic fact is that property is protected. The assumption is that these great concentrations of wealth are not going to be nationalized or at the very least, if they are, they'll be properly compensated. Now that's upheld by all sorts of trade agreements. But then you have also lots of additional things, tax policies that focus on income rather than wealth, loopholes on loopholes, on loopholes in the tax code lack enforcement, you know, army of wealth defense specialists. It's another concept from Winter's work to ensure that the wealthiest people pay a lower effective tax rate than the poorest people.
Countless other areas of policy that contribute to this intellectual property law, monetary policy, financial regulation, the way that military contracts work, they're all enriching various oligarchs, but take any of those away and you still have the system of private law that defends their wealth.
So that's the sense in which I think liberal democracy is the highest form of oligarchy. It's probably still better to live under a liberal democracy than other forms of oligarchy because oligarchs aren't intervening personally. But what we shouldn't imagine that it's not an oligarchy, and in a way that's what makes it the most reliable form of oligarchy is because it doesn't appear as an oligarchy.
SR: So let me turn to your critique of the liberal notion of state neutrality, which you just mentioned a moment ago, discussing the persistence of what some scholars call categorical inequalities. You explained that racial, ethnic or gender hierarchy survive even in apparently more inclusive liberal democratic societies due to the neutrality of private law. Guaranteed by the liberal democratic state continuing to protect and entrench disparities which have been created actually, by the earlier actions of the state itself, drawing on critical race theorists, for example, you've pointed out that state neutrality is anything but neutral as it fails to account for, let alone counter the accumulated effect of generations of hierarchy, privileges, and asymmetries in wealth and power. So instead of the liberal notion of neutrality, which can conceal or even serve the interests of privileged groups, as you just pointed out in your view, what we urgently need is what you call corrective partiality. So could you explain what you mean by this? Would affirmative action policies, for example, be a part of it, or diversity inclusion policies, all under attack currently by the Trump administration?
SB: I should start by saying that I think formal neutrality in many contexts is good actually. It's necessary, it's valuable, it's democratic. I'd venture to say even the vast majority of cases, sort of at least a pretense to neutrality, even if it may not be realizable actually should be the default refraining from partiality, special treatment in most legal arenas.
That said, a key flaw of many purely liberal visions of democracy is that instead of treating it just as this default, which can be overridden in certain cases, they treat it as an absolute and that you can't violate it at all. And there are these, contexts where what looks like a formal neutrality actually serves partial interests despite the fact that it appears neutral, that it has this formally neutral capacity.
There are these other cases where a formal policy of neutrality actually preserves the advantages of some groups at the expense of others. And so, you know, I talk about Catherine McKinnon's work on patriarchy and the feminist theory of the state, basically the whole book is one long account of how that works in the case of patriarchy.
And then there's a bunch of great scholarship that I'm drawing on in terms of race to show in the U.S. context. For instance, you know, neutrality means colorblindness. In other words, not taking race into account. Well, excuse me, we took race into account for 400 years and that has something to do with the fact that now the median wealth of black families is one 10th, that's one out of 10, one 10th the median wealth of white families in the United States.
In those circumstances, the state protecting the property of everyone equally and not doing anything to remediate that, that is state capture by the white families who have benefited from 400 years of collecting wealth, when black families were prevented from doing so, what neutrality means in that context is protecting the property of a certain group at the expense of others.
So corrective partiality in this case, it's going to depend on the circumstances. And I think, there are social, cultural issues with certain kinds of ways of trying to remedy that. Basically any kind of affirmative action reparations policy.
I mean, I'm kind of for it in the abstract. Which ones are best suited to a particular society might vary and if there are dangers of cultural, social backlash, you want to, navigate that in any particular set of circumstances.
And maybe we're facing a moment now where we have to switch strategies. If there's been this kind of cultural backlash to certain kinds of, ways of doing affirmative action and so on. There's plenty of other options. And so maybe it's time to think a little bit differently about how to do that. But I think we need to remediate this incredible imbalance, that has to happen somehow.
SR: So in the book, what you do is you add three new fundamental pillars or requirements for democracy to the three that are central to the liberal tradition, which we know constitutionalism, competition and universalism.
And you see these as certainly necessary to prevent or at least significantly reduce opportunities for capture. But in your view, these are insufficient. So you add three more preconditions, which you glean from much more radical critical traditions: anti-monopoly, countervailing power and systematic redistribution.
Now, I'm with you on all of these. However, these three are much more proactively oriented to what you refer to as the dispersion of private power among the social groups in competition or even in conflict with one another. So could you talk about these three fundamental principles which you'd like to add to the Democratic toolkit and give a few concrete examples to think about the kinds of tensions they may also generate?
SB: I think the idea that I have is that these three principles really extend the basic idea that is already present in that sort of constellation of liberal principles. If you think at least the way that I interpret these ideals of constitutionalism competition, universalism, they're all valuable.
The fundamental fact of our modern condition is that there are these enormous concentrations of power called states and a great deal depends on what happens, who controls the power of the of the state. And so what liberal democracy does is it makes the competition that is inevitably going to occur for access to state power. It makes that competition relatively constrained and peaceful. It's not exploding into violence when liberal democracy is working. And it keeps it relatively egalitarian in the sense that at least all groups have formal access to the tools of constitutionalism and competition and so on. If that principle is right, like if the way that we should fundamentally deal with the modern condition is to keep the competition for access to that power constrained, peaceful and egalitarian, then we need to do more to make it more egalitarian basically, and all of the radical principles are not about a fantasy of we're going to collectively control altogether the power of the state. They're about yes, it's always going to be a competition for access to that power, but let's make the competition more egalitarian.
And so the three radical principles are anti-monopoly, countervailing power, systemic redistribution, and basically they're just targeting different ends of the sort of distribution anti monopolies about how can we, the people, the people in groups that have the greatest access to state power, who have the most outsized ability to influence the state, how can we reduce their ability to do that. So, the language of anti-monopoly comes from the anti-antitrust sphere. So that's one manifestation of it, but it's not always the right way to deal with concentrations of power in business. Some other regulatory approaches can also be seen in this idea, wealth and inheritance taxes at a more individual level, reform of things like intellectual property law, salary caps, transparency burdens, and other rules that apply only to the super rich. So basically ways of targeting both the wealth and resources and the coordination capacity of people and institutions and groups at the top.
That would be policies that implement anti-monopoly in a more radical way. Countervailing power, ideas of how do you build collective power among various groups that have this counter hegemonic potential. In other words, they might feasibly organize in ways that are going to protect the state from capture by the people who have the most power at the top.
And then, systemic redistribution. Just how can we make the distribution relatively less skewed overall. So that's where I envision all sorts of redistributive policies as a kind of long-term vision for what it would mean, this idea of kind of unconditional transfer of wealth, just basically for the purpose of rebalancing power rather than for any other purpose, providing a basic income or anything like that, the purpose is to rebalance power. And that's why it's modeled on basic income policies, but I call it something else because the purpose is different.
SR: Let me take both of those in turn. So, I think your point here is to say that what we need is to ensure that there's a challenge to the hegemonic interests in every given society, and that we need counter hegemonic groups who are well-resourced and well organized, and that these groups are able to overcome the obstacles collective action in defense of their interests. So now I'm going to ask you some concrete ideas here. Who exactly is the subject here for you, or who are the agents who have both the capacity, the incentives, and the resources to effectively oppose hegemonic interest and given the imbalances that you've described in such detail, how can collective identity, solidarity, motivation, which will be needed for collective organization, be fostered?
SB: That's, I think, the most difficult question and the most important question. I certainly don't have all the answers, but I think I have some beginnings of some answers, perhaps the answer to who is the subject or the agent. I mean, there have to be many answers to that question.
There are many forms of state capture. There are many different elites and different groups that have access. So different agents and different subjects are going to be most effective at countering different forms of capture. In terms of the one that I devote the most attention to in the book capture by various wealthy elites. It's going to be some coalition of people who are not wealthy. So, people have thought of this in terms of workers or labor versus capital. That still has a lot of power. And I think that's one way to think about it.
But I think there are other ways of thinking about the agent at the bottom. I mean, the 99 percent is another one. You know, a lot of people in the 99 percent don't think of themselves as laborers or workers in that sense or part of the working class. But they do identify with a 99 percent. So if a new language and a new kind of subject or identity is necessary to get people involved, that's really important, but it's not just about the identity, that only can get you so far, you also need the concrete organizations, and that's where it's been really difficult to come up with alternatives to labor unions.
Labor unions are the example in history where this has been at least partly effective, Not everywhere, not all the time, and they have their own problems. But they've been the one force throughout, the last 200 years of history that has ever effectively really pushed back in a extended long-term, you know, overall kind of way against the capture by wealthy elites. So I think that's the model. And I think we need to, whatever happens, we need to reinvest and decline and that labor as a force is just passe. I think that's not true and we shouldn't give up because that is the one model that has ever worked. But I also think we do need to find other structures, other subjective identities, but also other kinds of structural forms that can actually foster identity and then translate it into collective power. So there's a lot of work going on now with debtors who have a certain collective capacity to withhold debt payments. That's something that capitalists will care about if they don't get their debt payments collectively. Renters similarly. And, these actually have really old histories of withholding rent from landlords, withholding debt. There's a lot of conflict about this going back in almost all societies actually. There can be collective power built along these lines as well.
So, I don't have a particular subject or agent in mind, there have to be lots of them rather than, you know, reducing it to one or seeing as one axis of conflict. That must be the dominant one. I'm definitely pushing away from that sort of view, but it really just depends on what's effective at pushing back and thus far in the recent historical memory, labor has been the most effective force.
SR: But, so just two thoughts on that one. Of course, what you're calling for in a way, when you're talking about debtors or renters, is civil disobedience and civil disobedience, which must be really organized on a large scale. I think the scale is important here, certainly, and what we've seen in Europe are social democratic parties, which would be organizing together with the labor unions on a large scale, and it's precisely the social democratic parties, which are in decline in most Western European countries.
Do you have any ideas as to why exactly at the moment at which redistribution should be such a large part of an agenda for equalizing the kind of imbalances of wealth and power that we see it's exactly social democracy, which is in decline?
SB: Well, I think it's certainly not unrelated and in a way it's a whole nest of causes. That's not my specialty, teasing out the direction of those causes, but they're certainly interrelated, like the decline of the labor movement and of social democratic parties is both a consequence of, and a causal contributing factor to the increasing levels of inequality that we see and the increasing levels of oligarchy, it's always tough to tease those directions apart, but I think it certainly goes both ways.
SR: But that's a situation in which I wanted to ask you now, this is of course not a political philosopher's question, but it's very much a question addressed to practical politics. How realistic is the prospect of agenda for redistribution of the kind that you are calling for? I mean, you are absolutely right that the dispersion of private power is central to democracy, and if that is the case then without redistribution of material resources, it will have no meaning. But we're in a situation, Sam, in which even the introduction of universal basic income is rapidly receding as a political priority and galloping inequality leading to concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite is just taking front stage in front of our very eyes so what you suggest is, in a sense, a radically utopian idea. And my question to you would be in the face of such formidable opposition as we have today, and that's why I mentioned the social democratic parties even they don't dare talk about redistribution. All of them are also in Europe talking today about the problem of migration.
SB: I mean I'm not especially optimistic either about the short or even really the medium term future and the ability to achieve any of this. some of the things that I talk about in the book certainly are long-term visions. I don't have any illusions that we're going to achieve something like the wealth transfers. For me the role of that kind of idea is about getting our visions right, which is going to then structure our aspirations in the present in a better way.
So it just provides a different way of thinking about, okay, if the goal isn't going to be this collective control of the means of production, which is the classic kind of socialist alternative, what would it mean to have much more radically egalitarian control over both political and economic decision making because, you know, so I'm not attracted to this ideal of collective control over the means of production, whatever that means because I don't think that there is such a thing as collective control. So I think the role of something like unconditional wealth transfers that I talk about, it's as an alternative vision of what a more egalitarian political economy would look like.
That's admittedly very utopian. You know, just like say, collective control of the means of production would be right in terms of what we need to do now, we have a lot more remedial action, we have a long way to go before that becomes something that is even on the table. And so that's why I focus towards the end, especially on, well, to some extent more remedial policies. But even the policies that I talk about towards the end and in chapter nine say it’s not something that is going to happen, tomorrow. Unless the balance of power shifts externally to that.
And I think that there are some potential developments we could see that would shift the balance of power, for exogenous reasons, just think technological developments or things that happen beyond our control. But in terms of what we can control, it's developing stronger organizations of countervailing power, and so that's where I focus.
Kind of my practical agenda is not on these sorts of dream policies that I would love to achieve. Somewhere that's more just about getting our ideals straight. In terms of what I think is most important politically, it's definitely investing in organizations of countervailing power, including reinvesting in the labor movement, but also all of these other sources of countervailing power. So to either sort of reinvigorate and get social democratic parties to recommit to those kinds of goals or perhaps to find alternatives to those parties either way, the important part is building the power outside of the parties. Then the parties can either build in or build on or negotiate with.
SR: So let me turn to my final question, and that is the normative ideal that you've described to us of democracy still assumes nation states as natural containers of societies, but when you talk about state capture in the book, you very briefly mentioned the credible the threats that hypermobile extremely wealthy global elites can make against national states. So capital exits, right, which you've talked about today as well. Some states, however, were much more vulnerable than others in this regard, especially in a world of dynamically shifting balances of geopolitical forces, geo-economic rivalry and contested sovereignty as we see at the moment.
So in your view, how can states, especially smaller or weaker ones, resist the power and influence of these elites who are non-domestic actors, but have an inordinate amount of influence over domestic policies abroad?
SB: When you have very powerful actors and then a lot of other people who at the whims of these really powerful actors. The key is getting collective action from the people whose interests are opposed to those very powerful actors. And in this case, we talk about within a domestic nation state, it's, you know, the power of workers or the power of debtors or tenants or whoever it is against the more concentrated power of their opponents within that context.
But on the international scale that is going to be the collective power of these weaker, smaller states. And it's perhaps even harder on the international scale than it is on the domestic scale, but I think there isn't another solution. And there's been a lot of work in political theory that's been inspiring in this regard to me recovering the history of political thought in especially early post-colonial states ideas about federations, the collective power that could be exerted by global south countries, which many of the leaders at the time understood would be necessary to meaningfully break free of the relations of domination that the formerly imperialist now capitalist powers had imposed on the rest of their world. They understood that they wouldn't be able to kind of stand up for themselves unless they banded together. You know, in the end, that's not what happened most of the time, partly because of all these interventions by the United States and other leading powers to make sure that that didn't happen, but also partly because it's really difficult and because there were internal domestic forces that didn't want that sort of internationalism to win the day. So yeah, I think there have to be opportunities and I think perhaps the climate issue is one that could help to foster greater collaboration among Global South and just in general, smaller countries pushing back against some of these kinds of trends. So that's where I see the possibilities. That's where I see the levers of power available, even if it's very hard to grab hold of them.
SR: So thank you so much, Sam, for this wide ranging conversation with many fascinating insights into a very different account of what a democracy could mean if we think of it in terms of resistance to state capture, and also ideas about where that resistance could come from in the form of countervailing power within societies, but also across them. Thanks so much for being with me today.
SB: It was great to be here. Thanks so much.
SR: Sam Bagg has made today a provocative but thought provoking argument about the pitfalls of valorizing greater inclusivity and participation as a democratic end in itself. In his view of one-sided emphasis on participatory politics can be easily captured and instrumentalized by elite interests.
So we need to pay greater attention to whether simply getting more people involved in decision making will advance democratic ideals or not. Popular legitimacy can be and has been invoked by many soft authoritarian leaders. However, the Democratic realization of popular will does not depend exclusively on unmediated collective participation.
Rather, as Sam pointed out, it also requires a range of institutional, legal, and bureaucratic checks and balances. This is why he suggested that a robust theory of democracy should focus less on participation per se and concern itself instead with what he calls resistance to state capture. For public interest and common good are intrinsically at risk of being inordinately influenced by actors or groups with greater power and wealth in society, so they can of course then succeed in imposing their own interests.
As some of Sam's examples today show state capture has international implications beyond national borders as well. This is partly due to the relationship between global elites and the hypermobile capital that they wield that can influence relatively smaller or weaker societies. But recent geopolitical developments should also alert us that even strong states in Europe could be impacted by such state capture in the United States, for example.
Sam has argued that by this logic, the modern liberal democratic state with its institutional architecture that's devoted to protecting private property could be seen as the ultimate guarantor of oligarchic wealth, concentration, and inequality. And it's even more effective because it doesn't appear to be an oligarchy to ordinary citizens.
Similarly, the normative liberal concept of state neutrality can often preserve as well as conceal durable inequalities in society, which are sedimented and reproduced over time. As critical theorists of race or gender have shown, neutrality may be valuable in principle, but in practice it can reinforce existing hierarchies and forms of oppression.
Neutrality can even actively prevent us from addressing these in the name of social justice or reparation. It's for this reason that Sam argues forcefully for what he calls corrective partiality instead of state neutrality. He proposes to compliment the three traditional principles of universalism, constitutionalism, and competition with the more radical edition of three other principles, namely of anti-monopoly, countervailing power, and systematic redistribution.
He acknowledges that the latter three principles will not be easy to articulate in terms of concrete social struggles, even though they make sense intuitively for large majorities in a society, we will thus need new languages and imaginaries, even new identities and subjectivities as well as specific collective organizations to further these three principles.
Hence the urgent need to find new structures and identities that could be translated effectively into collective power. As a political theorist, Sam is aware that his visions of countervailing power or systematic redistribution should be seen as long-term normatively oriented, almost utopian visions, which may seem to be receding evermore today.
It may be a daunting task to mobilize for collective action against powerful elites or to support poorer nations to stand up against the accumulated historical exploitation and injustice that they have suffered. But it's been fascinating, nevertheless, to listen to Sam Bagg’s passionate plea for envisioning democratic politics differently.
This was the eighth episode of Season 10. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks when my guest will be Luiza Bialasiewicz, professor and director of Ca’ Foscari School for International Education at the University of Venice. We'll talk about the challenges of democratizing defense and other divisive discussions within universities today.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast, if you're enjoying it, you can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[i] Bagg, S. E. (2024). The dispersion of power: A critical realist theory of democracy. Oxford University Press.