Cenk Uygur, Justice Is Coming: How Progressives Are Going to Take over the Country and America Is Going to Love It, St. Martin’s Press, 2023, 308 pp., $30.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781250272799

Not everyone hates corruption.  Conspicuously, the corrupt seem quite pleased with it, as it does not merely pay their bills but provides them with a lavish lifestyle that would likely be unattainable without it.  As everyone knows, however, most especially the corrupt themselves, this arrangement is only sustainable so long as the rest of us play by the rules.  And those of us who play by the rules, or mostly play by the rules, and who wish that everyone did, absolutely hate corruption.  This is because it is our efforts, our labor, our collective input and output, along with our willingness to play by the rules, that furnishes their prosperity.  And so it pains us deeply to see corruption flourish anywhere, but it is most especially heartbreaking and dispiriting when it is rampant within our governing institutions.  The very structure of society is thereby skewed, the system rigged to the advantage of the corrupt.  Particularly in a democracy, which is supposed to constitute self-governance, corruption alienates us not only from our institutions but from one another as citizens, and even – in the end – from ourselves.  This is deeply disastrous, and it’s a wonder, really, that it has not led to more thorough cynicism on the part of most Americans.  But very many of us remain reformers, rather than cynics, hoping against hope that we may yet somehow take back what it ours and really and truly govern ourselves.

This is the hope of Cenk Uygur in his Justice is Coming, as the title itself implies.   And I would say that it ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to know how we got into the mess we’re in as far as government corruption is concerned.  Chapter Four especially, “How We Lost Our Democracy,” the literal heart and center of the book, lays this out.  Uygur here presents us with a wonderfully succinct and particularly apt metaphor, as he does in other places in the book, of corporations as literal machines, programmed to do one thing, and one thing only: generate profit.  He calls the advent of the corporate era the “Rise of the Machines,” and likens our situation to a dystopian world in which our creations have taken over and subjugated us all.  We all recognize that we are in very real ways at the mercy of corporations, despite the fact that we created them and could in principle dismantle them or simply starve them of the one thing they need to survive: namely, money.  But we have struck a Faustian bargain: we’re hooked on what they provide; and so we feed them both our dollars and ultimately our souls.

But the real subjugation came when we handed over political power to corporations, through a handful of fateful legal decisions following from our establishment of corporations as legally recognized “people”, with rights akin to human individuals.  Given the massive economic power of corporate entities, to treat them as people confers upon them the status of giants, able to shape the landscape to their wills through sheer force of scale.  No one, not even the wealthiest individual humans, could outspend corporations, and so human voices become frail and weak next to the booming voice of corporate “donation” dollars.  As Uygur points out, we all know full well that these “donations” to our politicians are bribes and not mere “free speech,” as though they were somehow on a par with our pleas to our representatives for legislation that would favor human interests, rather than the interests of the machines.  But having allowed the corporate takeover of government, these bribes are legal transactions.  Want to know why gun laws are never, ever passed – laws that a majority of Americans support – that would prevent criminals and those suffering from mental illness from obtaining guns?  It’s not because a vocal activist minority of Americans are Second Amendment Absolutists and through gerrymandering and voter suppression are able to stack congress with gun-loving conservatives (although this is also true).  It’s because the NRA bribes our congresspeople, including the Democrats.  We all know this, and yet here we are.

But of course the question then becomes: what can we do about this?  What should we do about it?  Here’s where Uygur’s discussion unfortunately requires a good deal of storytelling.  By storytelling I mean an account of who benefits from this arrangement, who exploits it for what purposes, who is in a position to take the greatest advantage of our subjugation to the machines, and what the country would and should look like if we really got the legislation we actually want.  Now I want to be clear here.  I do not mean that such an account is “just a story,” in the sense of being a fiction or a fable we tell ourselves about our national identity; and nor do I mean a “narrative” in the common media parlance according to which such a story is essentially spin – although this is closer to what I mean.  What I mean is that such an account will be, by necessity, a totalizing worldview of American society and politics involving heroes and villains and a theodicy of our salvation and our destiny.  As a consequence, one’s choice of story is, in the end, going to come down more or less to one’s antecedent dispositions, prejudices, and preferences, and not merely to one’s capacity for rational reflection.  This is not to say that I do not find Uygur’s story compelling.  I do.  It’s pretty darn close to the story I myself would tell about America.  But I’d say that this is mostly a reflection of my dispositions and not because it’s just obviously the most rational position to take.  The problem – if you want to call it that – is that a conservative with very different dispositions, prejudices, and preferences, is going to opt for a very different story about what our situation means, and thus about what should be done about it and who takes the most advantage of it, and so on.  And though of course I think they’re just wrong, I also want to admit right here and now that I can’t neatly prove this in any finite series of rational steps that would be equally cognitively compelling to anyone with a working brain.  And so the rest of Uygur’s book – or at least the part of it where he makes a case for how America ought to look if we were able to achieve real justice – is, unsurprisingly, going to persuade few if any conservatives.

And that’s fine, as far as it goes.  Uygur makes it clear that it was what he calls activist conservative judges, specially appointed to achieve this result, who were responsible for the legal decisions that handed dominating political power over to corporations.  But it could frankly just as well have been liberal pro-corporate judges.  Uygur is hardly the first to point out that both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, are now almost entirely beholden to corporate interests.  We have what the right-wing appropriately calls the “UniParty”, which answers only to its donors and its own self-interest, and not to us.  Uygur gives those on the right credit for this realization, but argues that they then part ways with logic and reality by falling victim to conspiracy theories and misinformation.  But this is precisely where the storytelling begins.  In the absence of an agreed-upon set of fact-generating institutions to which we can appeal in support of one or another story, “alternative facts” do not appear so obviously to be an oxymoron, and can seem instead like basic common sense.  And if you’re predisposed to believe that the liberal elites wield unauthorized, unjustified, nearly unlimited illegitimate power over our institutions, then conspiracy theories are going to seem pretty plausible as an explanation of a wide variety of social and political phenomena.  If, on the other hand, you’re predisposed to believe that a minority of extremist conservatives have largely hijacked our electoral processes and our legislatures and are trying to co-opt our national organs of state power, then fear of liberal elites is going to seem at best to be misplaced paranoia, at worst a justification for political violence against targeted outgroups.  Uygur does not do nearly enough in the way of making a case for the possibility of consensus as to which institutions and authorities can be trusted to speak the truth, and does not do nearly enough in the way of recognizing the significance of the lack of such consensus for our ability to endorse any given story.  Part of the problem is that he thinks he doesn’t really need to worry about this, for reasons that I’ll get to later; but it’s a blind spot in his argument.

And he spends just way too much time on mainstream media.  This is a problem for at least two reasons.  The first is that, as he himself points out, the average age of a viewer of CNN is 67, and the average age of a viewer of MSNBC is 71.  This means that his diatribe against mainstream media could only possibly be meant for a very narrow audience which is not likely to comprise the primary readership of his book.  Here he’s preaching to the choir, and not only is this (obviously) unnecessary, it’s actually counterproductive.  This is because, if he’s right in his assessment of the media and their pro-corporate bias, given their viewership demographic this therefore cannot be the correct explanation of the supposed prevalence of the mistaken impression that America is a center-right nation.  One hears this repeated in the media regularly, but whether this is in fact a common misperception is at best debatable.  Conservatives for the most part seem to both believe that they are the majority and to know full well that they comprise a dwindling minority whose star is quickly fading and so must be defended at all costs against the onslaught of Woke Culture lest right-minded, commonsense, conservative values vanish completely.  Whether liberals and progressives realize that they are the majority, the real problem is that they don’t act like it.  This has little if anything to do with their self-perception as it relates to their numbers and their representation in media and culture.  It may very well have as much to do with majoritarian complacency as anything else, and Uygur’s discussion does nothing to address this.  In fact, if anything, Uygur’s thesis threatens to exacerbate this complacency, which is my chief complaint about the book.

Uygur regards the progressive takeover of America as inevitable.  I myself regard this attitude as both dangerous and unproductive.  His argument is essentially purely numeric: young Americans are overwhelmingly progressive; so, the future can only be progressive, as the retrograde elements of society will inevitably pass away.  (Uygur is wise, and correct, to consider and dismiss the standard canard that people tend to become more conservative as they get older, and he provides the data that disprove it.)  But this of course ignores a whole host of potential factors that could ultimately wholly derail this genial prospect.  For instance, if I could, I would ask Uygur whether and how he thinks the central argument of his book would be affected by Donald Trump being re-elected in 2024.  I’d say that this eventuality would be likely to have a pretty significant impact, possibly for many decades yet to come.  But beyond that, Uygur seems to overlook his own point that popular power can be co-opted and subverted by monied interests, as de Tocqueville pointed out is always a potential threat in any democracy.  I am reminded here of a point made by the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, in his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics:

• the rise of industrial capitalism in the West appears to have been a product of a unique conjunction of circumstances, the outcome of a particular history that gives the impression of inevitability only in retrospect, having been determined largely by the defeat of social groups opposed to large-scale production and by the elimination of competing programs of economic development. …  In the words of Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, it did not grow out of the “imminent logic of technological change.”  It was the product of an “implicit collective choice, arrived at in the obscurity of uncountable small conflicts.”[1]

This is an extremely important point well worth remembering: the systems and the laws and rules under which we live are choices that we make together.  As Uygur himself points out, corporate rule was the deliberate, chosen product of specific “uncountable small conflicts” over how much power our profit-machines should have in our public and political life.  This outcome was not inevitable, and the very fact that we could perhaps still change it proves this very point.  I fear that proclaiming the defeat of the machines to be inevitable will only contribute to the sort of unfortunate complacency we already see too much of on the left, and which could potentially make a 2024 Trump victory that much more likely – which would be an unmitigated disaster.  And anyway, it’s just false to say that a progressive future is inevitable.  A thousand things could prevent it.  So if this is indeed the future we want, we first need to be able to make a case for the story in which a progressive victory is right and just, and not merely numerically unavoidable.  (Uygur makes a reasonably good case for this, at least in part, in Chapters 2 and 7, but a full-throated defense would probably take another book.)  And secondly, we need to remind ourselves that the future does not make itself as a matter of dialectical necessity.  We choose what we become.

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[1] Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), p. 163.