No
country with a McDonald’s can remain a democracy
George Monbiot
The
best way to combat the likes of Trump, Le Pen and Farage and the
politics they represent is to rescue power from the grip of
transnational corporations
Tuesday 6 December
2016 18.57 GMT
A wave of revulsion
rolls around the world. Approval ratings for incumbent leaders are
everywhere collapsing. Symbols, slogans and sensation trump facts and
nuanced argument. One in six Americans now believe that military rule
would be a good idea. From all this I draw the following, peculiar
conclusion: no country with a McDonald’s can remain a democracy.
Twenty years ago,
the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proposed his “golden
arches theory of conflict prevention”. This holds that “no two
countries that both have McDonald’s have ever fought a war against
each other since they each got their McDonald’s”.
Friedman’s was one
of several end-of-history narratives suggesting that global
capitalism would lead to permanent peace. He claimed that it might
create “a tip-over point at which a country, by integrating with
the global economy, opening itself up to foreign investment and
empowering its consumers, permanently restricts its capacity for
troublemaking and promotes gradual democratisation and widening
peace”. He didn’t mean that McDonald’s ends war, but that its
arrival in a nation symbolised the transition.
In using McDonald’s
as shorthand for the forces tearing democracy apart, I am, like him,
writing figuratively. I do not mean that the presence of the burger
chain itself is the cause of the decline of open, democratic
societies (though it has played its part in Britain, using our
defamation laws against its critics). Nor do I mean that countries
hosting McDonald’s will necessarily mutate into dictatorships.
The old forms and
forums still exist, but their power seeps away, re-emerging where we
can no longer reach it
What I mean is that,
under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital that
McDonald’s exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and
dies. The old forms and forums still exist – parliaments and
congresses remain standing – but the power they once contained
seeps away, re-emerging where we can no longer reach it.
The political power
that should belong to us has flitted into confidential meetings with
the lobbyists and donors who establish the limits of debate and
action. It has slipped into the diktats of the IMF and the European
Central Bank, which respond not to the people but to the financial
sector. It has been transported, under armed guard, into the icy
fastness of Davos, where Friedman finds so warm a welcome (even when
he’s talking cobblers).
Above all, the power
that should belong to the people is being crushed by international
treaty. Contracts such as Nafta, Ceta the proposed TransPacific
Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement and the failed
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are crafted behind
closed doors in discussions dominated by corporate lobbyists. And
those lobbyists are able to slip in clauses no informed electorate
would ever approve of, such as the establishment of opaque offshore
tribunals, through which corporations can bypass national courts,
challenge national laws and demand compensation for the results of
democratic decisions.
These treaties limit
the scope of politics, prevent states changing social outcomes and
drive down labour rights, consumer protection, financial regulation
and the quality of neighbourhoods. They make a mockery of
sovereignty. Anyone who forgets that striking them down was one of
Donald Trump’s main promises will fail to understand why people
were prepared to risk so much in electing him.
At the national
level too, the McDonald’s model destroys meaningful democracy.
Democracy depends on reciprocal belief, trust and belonging: the
conviction that you belong to the nation and the nation belongs to
you. The McDonald’s model, by rooting out attachment, could not
have been better designed to erase that perception.
As Tom Wolfe
observes in his novel A Man in Full, “the only way you could tell
you were leaving one community and entering another was when the
franchise chains started repeating and you spotted another 7-Eleven,
another Wendy’s, another Costco, another Home Depot”. The
alienation and anomie this destruction of place promotes are enhanced
by the casualisation of labour and a spirit-crushing regime of
monitoring, quantification and assessment (at which McDonald’s
excels). Public health disasters contribute to the sense of rupture.
After falling for decades, for instance, death rates among
middle-aged white Americans are now rising. Among the likely causes
are obesity and diabetes, opioid addiction and liver failure,
diseases whose carriers are corporations.
Corporations,
released from democratic constraints, drive us towards climate
breakdown, an urgent threat to global peace. McDonald’s has done
more than its fair share: beef production is among the most powerful
causes of climate change.
In his book The
Globalisation Paradox, the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik describes a
political trilemma. Democracy, national sovereignty and
hyperglobalisation, he argues, are incompatible. You cannot have all
three at once. McDonaldisation crowds out domestic politics.
Incoherent and dangerous as it often is, the global backlash against
mainstream politicians is at heart an attempt to reassert national
sovereignty against the forces of undemocratic globalisation.
An article about the
history of the Democratic party by Matt Stoller in the Atlantic
reminds us that a similar choice was articulated by the great US
jurist Louis Brandeis. “We may have democracy, or we may have
wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,”
he said. In 1936 the congressman Wright Patman managed to pass a bill
against the concentration of corporate power. Among his targets was
A&P, the giant chainstore of his day, which was hollowing out
towns, destroying local retailers and turning “independent
tradesmen into clerks”.
In 1938 President
Roosevelt warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if
the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it
becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its
essence, is fascism.” The Democrats saw concentrated corporate
power as a form of dictatorship. They broke up giant banks and
businesses and chained the chainstores. What Roosevelt, Brandeis and
Patman knew has been forgotten by those in power, including powerful
journalists. But not by the victims of this system.
One of the answers
to Trump, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Salvini, Duterte, Le Pen, Farage
and the politics they represent is to rescue democracy from
transnational corporations. It is to defend the crucial political
unit that is under assault by banks, monopolies and chainstores:
community. It is to recognise that there is no greater hazard to
peace between nations than a corporate model that crushes democratic
choice.
Twitter:
@GeorgeMonbiot. A fully linked version of this column will be
published at monbiot.com
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