Thomas Meaney, one of America’s sharpest critics, has published a superb essay in The Nation on Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order:

Fukuyama curiously glides over the major historical problem in The Origins, which is, quite simply, that liberalism, capitalism and democracy have always been uneasy bedfellows. In its raw form, the principle of democracy—rule by and for the people—sits awkwardly with the defining principle of capitalist organization, which necessitates political arrangements that encourage unequal concentrations of wealth. Democracy has prospered in the West largely because its capitalist economies have redefined what democracy means. The architects of international capitalism long ago recognized that people could better serve the interests of the market as limited stakeholders rather than as disenfranchised masses. The great liberal reforms of the nineteenth century (which Fukuyama will have to address in the second volume of his book) were not undertaken by revolutionary parties but by conservative statesmen—Bismarck in Prussia, Disraeli in Britain, Cavour in Italy—who ingeniously enlisted working people on the side of the propertied classes before they got different ideas. With the virtual disappearance of powerful people’s parties in the past fifty years, Fukuyama is right to see fewer alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy on the horizon. But this is hardly because as a form of government it somehow fits human nature, or allows for the fuller flourishing of mutual recognition. The success of liberal capitalist democracy stems from its astonishing track record in improving the material conditions of vast numbers of people around the globe, while continuing to restrict access to the political, cultural and financial capital amassed by its elites. Yet even the security of those elites is threatened when democratically elected governments become feeble instruments for holding political power accountable.

Meaney makes reference to the the “propertied classes.” Historically, this makes a good deal of sense. Property, however, comes in many different forms. T.H. Marshall, the pioneering British sociologist and social democrat, wrote of the expansion of rights — from civil to political to social. Social citizenship rights can be understood as entitlements or claims on various social resources. At the heart of the social democratic idea is the notion that all citizens should be allowed to share in the productive potential of the commonwealth. In practice, however, certain constituencies are granted privileged access. Elite public workers, for example, command a somewhat greater share of public resources than non-elite public workers, and public workers have prior claim on social resources relative to, say, struggling single mothers, at least when we consider the legal structure of public pension benefits as opposed to welfare benefits, etc. A more expansive definition of the “propertied classes” might include people with privileged claims to “social property.”

One of the defining features of a society like ours is that political, cultural, and financial capital are not held by the same people. The groups that dominate these spheres certainly overlap. But there are groups that control critical choke points. Among organized public school teachers, there is a shared conviction that billionaire philanthropists are trying to take over America’s public education system. Their failure to effect serious systemic change so far, and the willingness of most philanthropists in the public education space to accommodate union interests, should be an indication that the concentrated financial power of the activist wing of “the 1 percent” is no real match for the combination of political power, narrative appeal, and organizational and financial resources of over 4 million public school teachers and their friends, partners, and dependents. The only force that can really weaken the power of this particular elite is the emergence of low-cost technologies that offer an alternative to traditional instruction — and of course efforts have been made to stymie the deployment of these technologies.

If we believe that the health and education sectors are, as Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz have put it, “the new commanding heights,” i.e., that these sectors have a crucial impact on whether or not “the material conditions of vast numbers of people around the globe” will improve or deteriorate, the fact that both sectors are dominated by public sector elites and powerful corporate incumbents that fear new entrants is not insignificant.

All of this is to say that a familiar narrative concerning the corruption of our democracy — that it is driven by corporations and the wealthy, and that the historically unusual rise of public workers unions is either irrelevant or benign — might not be entirely sound.

This is why I tend to think that the struggle to reform public services is directly related to the struggle to reform patents, occupational licensing, copyright, and other means through which the state grants monopoly rights to politically powerful citizens.