Camila Vergara’s Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic is a book for the times, not only in the United States or her native Chile but also in many so-called advanced democracies where the oligarchization of politics has also taken place. For her, the dominant political system—which she prefers to call “liberal representative government,” rather than “representative democracy,” to avoid any confusion—is hopelessly oligarchic and, specifically, plutocratic. It is systematically corrupt in the sense of being a system that serves the interests of the few wealthy instead of those of the majority of people.
Vergara is a realist about power. She does not believe that the ruling elites can be convinced by the forceless force of the better argument to relinquish control or money. Like Machiavelli, John McCormick, Jacques Rancière, or Chantal Mouffe, Vergara is also a proponent of an agonistic form of politics centering conflict and pitting representatives of different interests—centrally, the wealthy versus the poor. Her solution to systemic corruption is not, therefore, better democratic representation and deliberation among citizen legislators combined with direct democracy moments (my own, more irenic solution in Open Democracy).
Instead, her solution is to empower the many in their fight against the few by creating a new branch of government that constitutionalizes the power of the oppressed. This plebeian branch would be “aimed not at achieving self-government or direct democracy, but rather at serving anti-oligarchic ends: to judge and censor elites who rule” (p. 5). Therefore, the goal for Vergara is not democracy, which perhaps is too unachievable an ideal or, more likely in her view, one that fails to address the irreducible conflict between the few and the many. Vergara’s goal is instead a plebeian republic, a mixed regime that allows the many to resist and push back against the rule of the few. She focuses on the strictly oligarchic component of liberal representative government, presumably the root of all other evils for her; namely, the irreducible tension between the few and the many, which also happens to correspond to the class divide between rich and poor. Thus, her focus is more narrowly economic and more classically Marxist in that way.
At the same time her rejection of the system runs deeper. She has no interest in salvaging liberalism per se, as many critical theorists (such as the late Charles Mills) ultimately do. In fact, her preferred solutions—distinct forms of political representation for the rich and the poor and occasionally the expropriation of wealth—are direct challenges to the liberal framework. And although she toes the lines in various places—trying to stay within a broadly liberal constitutional framework to avoid class essentialization—it is clear that she would have no hesitation rolling back certain sacralized liberal rights, particularly property rights, if doing so would help reestablish a form of balance between the few and the many.
Vergara is right to distinguish between different ideals: democracy on the one hand, liberalism (and the rule of law) on the other. But she goes further. For her, liberalism is not just distinct from democracy. As an ideology it is an obstacle to plebeian power, the value she is most concerned about because she sees it as the only way to protect the poor masses from domination by the wealthy few.
Vergara is thus a radical plebeian and, indeed, a proud populist thinker in the sense that her philosophy and political vision are primarily motivated by a desire to resist elitism. Citing historian Martin Breaugh, she characterizes the plebeian political experience as taking place when “people excluded from the res publica transform themselves into political subjects able to act in concert” (p. 219). Against the negative vision of populism as essentially defined by its antipluralism and illiberalism (see, e.g., Jan-Werner Mueller), Vergara posits a positive form of populism that is instead essentially about helping the poor and downtrodden find themselves and unite to fight off elite domination. There is something noble and attractive about this vision. Vergara’s version of “plebeian populism” is thus a much-needed perspective in the debate over populism’s definition. Her book also satisfyingly taps a justified rage at the state of the world and should remind democrats of what they should be fighting for.
Let me here, however, raise some questions about the reasoning and premises that lead Vergara to her populist conclusions.
A first question concerns the diagnosis of “systemic corruption.” Vergara’s account of existing corruption is mostly descriptive and does not seek to provide a causal story as to what exactly causes systemic corruption in modern governments. Yet identifying a causal mechanism would seem important if we are to explain the difference between the extreme levels of plutocratic corruption in Chile, the United States, or the United Kingdom (Vergara’s favorite but perhaps not entirely representative examples) and, say, the much lower levels of corruption in places like Norway, Denmark and generally Northern Europe. What is the property of liberal representative governments that causes some of them, but crucially not all, to drift toward plutocracy? The causality is a bit nebulous, which makes it hard to be convinced that liberal representative government is intrinsically, as opposed to contingently, plutocratic. It is true that elections will naturally bring to power social elites, but these social elites need not be the rich or at least the richest. They could simply be, as in much of Europe, the more educated. Because the story lacks a clear causal account of the plutocratic aspects of liberal representative government, it is also hard to be convinced of Vergara’s preferred solution: a mixed constitution with a plebeian branch.
Indeed, objectors might argue that the problem with systemic corruption in some countries today has less to do with the regime form of any government and more to do with capitalism, globalization, and technological change. The globalization of capitalist economies, in particular, tends to weaken state regulation of corporations, accelerate economic inequalities, and ultimately make it possible for the wealthy few to conquer the political sphere by pouring money behind the representatives of their class interest (e.g., the not-always-so-rich but educated members of parliaments). If this is true, then a problem for Vergara is that any regime, including the mixed plebeian constitution she favors, might still be vulnerable to corruption to the extent that the economic sphere is where the real power is held today.
A second question has to do with the reason for privileging a mixed constitution—a republic—over an actual democracy as the end goal of her radical politics. For all its radicalness, indeed, the book advocates for what could appear as a democratic regression: abandoning the ideal of a democratic regime, in which the people rule, including through their democratic representatives, in favor of a mixed republican regime in which the people are only given the power to judge and censor. The book is thus ready to mobilize revolutionary means involving radical constitutional reforms for mostly defensive purposes.
Instead of adding a popular branch that judges and censors, why not democratize existing branches of government? Advocates of the use of sortition in politics (including myself) have proposed replacing, or at the very least supplementing, elected parliaments with assemblies based on civic lotteries, paired with the frequent use of citizens’ initiatives and referenda. By design lotteries would bring to (legislative) power mostly lower and middle-class people because there are typically more of them, breaking the plutocratic bias where it exists. Other complementary solutions would involve rethinking the economic sphere so as to democratize the governance of corporations on the model of German co-determination or through the generalization of worker-owned and directed cooperatives. Vergara seems so resigned to rule by economic elites that she devotes her energies to imagining a constitution in which the multitudes of the poor can resist domination, rather than a system in which they can be put in charge.
This kind of realism is not unjustified. It might be more urgent and feasible at this point in history to fight for institutions that empower the downtrodden against the powerful, rather than to try to imagine and bring to life an authentic democratic system. Vergara does not even believe that there exists any institutionalization of people’s power in modern constitutions, except for the lone case of the Swiss Landsgemeinde system (p. 4, n. 9). Her position is thus perfectly coherent, though I think she overlooks the potential of existing institutions and current participatory processes.
A deeper reason than realism, however, probably explains Vergara’s focus on empowering the ruled against the rulers, rather than on giving people access to the site of ruling itself, and that is her definition and metaphysics of “the people,” which leads to my third point. Vergara defines the people as “those who do not rule and resist oligarchic oppression” (p. 224). She also seeks to inaugurate a vision of the people as a “network,” specifically a network of local assemblies inspired by the eighteenth-century constitutional schemes of philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet. Vergara’s definition of the people is thus both the people who are ruled in the current system and aspirationally, under a better system, fluxes of information and communication between local assemblies.
A difficulty with defining the people as the ruled is that anyone in a position of power or not resisting oligarchic oppression is thus excluded from being part of “the people.” Vergara thus excludes public officials and their staff, lobbyists, judges, military commanders, and religious leaders from her conception of the people. This is problematic. Building the distinction between the few and the many in terms of power rather than wealth avoids class essentialization but is still a form of essentialization. Ultimately, it is not clear why “the people” is a category that should exclude any citizen at all. Meanwhile, the aspirational view of the people as a network of assemblies is also troubling, at least if it means deprioritizing the ontological, moral, and political primacy of individuals.
The combination of an exclusionary definition of the people, a metaphysics of the people as network, and Vergara’s approval of measures like the expropriation of wealth will certainly make liberals nervous. And to be fair, part of the fun and excitement of the book is its clear desire to scare the bourgeoisie. Yet it would be a pity if the radicalness of the overall vision blinded us to the genuine democratic potential of many of Vergara’s concrete proposals. I for one would find institutions like the Tribunate and the Condorcetian network of assemblies to be quite desirable, if inserted in an authentic democratic scheme rather than the mixed-regime type preferred by Vergara. I could envisage such institutions playing a role in my own open democracy model, not so much as anti-elite bulwarks pushing back against plutocratic domination but rather as different and complementary forms of democratic representations, supplementing the work of a central lottocratic assembly (and elected ones in a hybrid model) and offering an additional accountability mechanism for the whole system. They would play a supporting role in a division of labor between different forms of citizen representation and participation, all of which have their limits and blind spots and none of which should have the privilege of speaking exclusively for “the people.”
Vergara’s is an enormously ambitious, inventive, and provocative book. As usual, it will strike some as too radical and others as not radical enough. But given the state of democracy today, some of its institutional proposals are worth thinking about. Vergara’s book is thus an exciting invitation to engage in the radical rethinking that the times call for.
