Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption
The productive minority sustains democracy, which increasingly favours the consumptive majority. Only one can win.
The liberal ideal of democracy rests upon a particular vision of the citizen: informed, engaged, and capable of self-government. This citizen reads, deliberates, and votes with an eye toward the common good, or at least toward a reasoned conception of their own long-term interests. The franchise, in this view, is not merely a mechanism for preference aggregation but the capstone of a civic culture that produces citizens worthy of self-rule. This was the democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the young American republic, that John Stuart Mill theorised in his essays on representative government, and that the post-war liberal order claimed to universalise.
Yet democracy has always possessed a second meaning, one that operates alongside and increasingly in tension with the first. This is democracy as consumer sovereignty, which grants the freedom to choose among an abundance of goods, services, and lifestyles. In market societies, the shopping mall and the ballot box have become companion institutions, each promising a form of empowerment that flatters the individual as the ultimate arbiter of value. For many citizens of prosperous nations, the freedom to consume has become indistinguishable from freedom itself. In some cases, it has superseded political liberty entirely. Residents of the Gulf Arab states or China often express contentment with political arrangements that would strike classical liberals as intolerably paternalistic, provided the consumer economy delivers. When polled, they speak less of voting rights than of purchasing power.
This substitution is not merely a curiosity of authoritarian development models. It has penetrated Western democracies themselves, where the citizen-as-consumer has gradually displaced the citizen-as-producer. The distinction matters. A producer contributes to the common stock of wealth through labour, investment, or enterprise; their relationship to the polity is one of mutual obligation. A consumer draws upon that stock; their relationship to the polity is one of entitlement. When producers predominate in a democracy, politics tends toward questions of investment, infrastructure, and institution-building, toward the conditions of future prosperity. When consumers predominate, politics tends toward questions of distribution, transfer, and immediate gratification, toward the division of existing wealth.
The productive class, as used here, comprises those whose economic activity augments the nation’s capacity to generate wealth: entrepreneurs who build enterprises, workers who create goods and services, investors who fund capital formation, and professionals whose expertise enables these activities. Their income derives from production – adding to the common stock rather than subtracting from it. This category includes much of the public sector: teachers who form human capital, doctors who maintain the health of the workforce, engineers who build infrastructure. It excludes those whose roles, however well-compensated, consist primarily in administering redistribution or enforcing compliance – the metastasising bureaucracies of human resources, diversity management, and regulatory box-ticking that consume resources without augmenting productive capacity.
The consumptive class comprises those whose income derives primarily from claims upon wealth created by others. At the bottom, this includes transfer recipients and those whose inactivity, whether voluntary or involuntary, removes them from production entirely. At the top – and this must be emphasised – it includes: the rentier interests that extract far more than any benefit claimant; the financialised elite whose wealth derives from asset appreciation rather than enterprise; the property speculators who profit from scarcity they lobby to maintain; the managerial class whose compensation bears no relationship to value created; the consulting and compliance industries that exist to navigate the complexity that their own existence generates. If the benefit recipient extracts thousands, the rentier extracts millions.
The problem is not that consumptive classes exist – every society has dependents, and compassion for the unable is a mark of civilisation – but that the ratio of consumers to producers has grown unsustainable, and that the largest consumers have organised the political system to protect their extraction while deflecting blame onto the smallest.
The tension between these orientations is not new, but its current intensity is. In post-war Western democracies, a rough equilibrium was obtained for several decades. The productive classes – broadly, the working and middle bourgeoisie – commanded sufficient electoral weight to ensure that policy remained oriented toward growth, savings, and capital formation. Consumption was high by historical standards, but it was consumption funded by production, not by borrowing against the future or by extracting from a shrinking productive base.
This equilibrium has now broken down. The productive classes have shrunk, both in absolute numbers and in political influence, while the consuming classes, including pensioners, beneficiaries of state transfers, and those employed in non-productive sectors, have grown. Democracy increasingly functions as a mechanism for the latter to extract from the former.
Consider contemporary Britain. A now viral meme circulating on social media depicts “Nick, ans 30”, a composite portrait of the professional-managerial millennial. Nick earns perhaps £50,000 a year in a demanding job, enough to place him in the higher tax brackets but not enough to afford a home in the city where his employer is located. Nick’s marginal tax rate, including National Insurance (and maybe student loans), approaches 50%.
Should he earn more, the extraction intensifies: those earning between £100,000 and £125,000 face effective marginal rates of over 60% as their personal allowance is withdrawn pound for pound; parents in the £60,000–£80,000 band, once child benefit clawback and student loan repayments are included, can face rates approaching 70%. The tax authorities estimate that 2.3 million workers will be caught in these traps by the decade’s end, a figure that grows annually as thresholds remain frozen against inflation.
Nick cannot accumulate capital; he services a rental market inflated by policies that benefit existing property owners. More than half of baby boomers owned property by age 30; fewer than 3 in 10 millennials do. The taxes he pays fund the state pensions and healthcare of the ‘Boomer’ generation that bought houses for sums that now seem fantastical, and they fund the benefits of a growing population that does not work at all. Nick is told he lives in one of the world’s richest societies, but his lived experience is of downward mobility. His parents, with equivalent credentials and work ethic, enjoyed security at 30 that he may not achieve at 50.
This framework clarifies a particular hypocrisy in contemporary British politics. The generation that has used its demographic weight to consume the surplus of current producers through triple-locked pensions, healthcare spending that rises inexorably with age, and property wealth accumulated behind exclusionary planning regimes, is the same generation that now drives the populist right’s fixation on migration. Yet the migrant, whatever burden they may place on public services, consumes a fraction of what the pensioner consumes in annual transfers. The young worker paying 40-50% of their income in tax, rent, and student loans is not being impoverished by the asylum seeker or migrant worker as much as they are being disadvantaged by the pensioner who owns their rented flat, by the planning regime that prevents new construction, by the landlord interest that captures housing benefit, and by the financial sector that inflates asset prices while starving productive enterprise of capital. The politics of distraction works precisely because it directs resentment downward and outward rather than upward – toward those with the least power rather than those with the most.
This is why the populist right, including Britain’s variant, the Reform party, and its analogues across the Western democracies, from Trump’s Republicans to the European nationalist parties, will not solve the problem. These movements depend on democratic mobilisation; they require votes, and votes come disproportionately from the elderly and the asset-owning. No populist leader will touch the triple lock, means-test benefits for wealthy pensioners, or reform the planning system against homeowners' interests. These are the third rails of democratic politics precisely because they run through the heart of the populist coalition. Targeting migrants and foreigners satisfies short-term anger but does nothing to address the structural extraction. It kicks the can down the road while the political-economic situation worsens. The right-wing populist, for all his rhetoric of national renewal, is as dependent on the consumptive majority as the centrist technocrat he claims to oppose. He cannot reform the system because his voters are the system.
The policy regime that produces this outcome is not an accident but the predictable result of democratic incentives. Pensioners vote in large numbers and will punish any party that threatens their entitlements. Beneficiaries of working-age transfers, though less electorally reliable, constitute a growing bloc in marginal constituencies. The professional middle class, by contrast, is relatively small, geographically concentrated, and lacks a party that reliably represents its interests. Both major parties compete to offer more to the consuming classes while extracting more from the producing classes. The coalition that wins elections is precisely the coalition that accelerates the extraction.
Nor is Britain exceptional. Across the developed democracies, similar dynamics prevail. The United States of America offers greater scope for accumulation by its productive class. Still, it has permitted its educational and municipal institutions to decay under the weight of administrative bloat and redistributive capture.
Europe, including the wealthy nations of France and Germany, and the less wealthy southern European countries, maintains even more explicit systems of intergenerational and inter-class transfer. Germany and the Nordic states have delayed the reckoning through export surpluses and accumulated capital, but their demographic trajectories point toward the same terminus.
Everywhere, the pattern is the same: democracy has become a machine for transferring wealth from those who create it to those who consume it.
This pattern would have been familiar to Bertrand de Jouvenel, whose 1945 treatise, On Power, remains one of the most prescient analyses of the dynamics of modern government. De Jouvenel observed that political power, across historical regimes, tends to operate through an alliance between the highest and lowest classes against the middle class. The monarch (i.e. the state), seeking to expand its authority, finds natural allies in the poor, who benefit from redistribution and resent the local elites of the middle class who stand between them and the centre of power. The middle class (the gentry, the bourgeoisie, the productive professions) find themselves squeezed from above and below, their wealth and independence eroded by an expanding state that claims to act in the name of the people.
De Jouvenel wrote in an age of encroaching totalitarianism, and his analysis applied most directly to the communist and fascist states of his era. But the dynamic he described has proven durable in democratic contexts. The administrative state of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has achieved by gradual expansion what earlier regimes achieved by violent rupture, reaching into every domain of life, funded by a tax burden that falls disproportionately on the productive middle, and justified by an ideology of universal entitlement that delegitimises any resistance. The coalition that sustains this expansion is precisely the top-bottom alliance de Jouvenel identified: an administrative and professional elite that benefits from the management of redistribution, allied with a beneficiary class that receives the transfers.
In this schema, the productive middle occupies an increasingly untenable position. They are too numerous to ignore but too dispersed to organise effectively. They lack the cultural capital to dominate elite discourse and the electoral weight to dominate mass politics. Their interests are in lower taxes, less regulation, stable money, and predictable institutions; precisely those that the top-bottom coalition has no incentive to provide. What, then, are their options?
One option is exit. Increasingly, productive individuals and enterprises have begun to relocate toward jurisdictions that offer more favourable terms. Dubai, Singapore, Portugal, and certain American states have become refuges for entrepreneurs, professionals, and wealth-holders fleeing high-tax, high-regulation regimes. This is not a mass migration – the costs of exit remain prohibitive for most – but it represents a meaningful erosion of the productive base. The individuals who leave are disproportionately those with the highest earning potential, the most portable skills, and the greatest capacity for wealth creation. Those who remain are, by definition, less mobile, less productive, or more dependent on local networks that cannot be replicated abroad.
A second option is withdrawal without exit: a reduction in productive effort that stops short of relocation. This takes many forms: early retirement, part-time work, refusal of promotions that would push one into higher tax brackets, preference for leisure over income at the margin, movement into cash economies or grey markets that evade taxation. The phenomenon is complex to measure but widely observed. Anecdotally, one encounters it constantly among high earners in the professional classes: the surgeon who cuts back on operations, the consultant who declines new clients, the entrepreneur who sells out rather than scaling up. Each decision is rational given the incentive structure; in aggregate, they represent a substantial reduction in the economy's productive capacity.
Neither exit nor withdrawal constitutes a rebellion in the classical sense. The productive classes are not storming barricades or forming revolutionary parties. Their revolt is quieter: a gradual disengagement from a system they perceive as rigged against them. This is the pattern that Francis Fukuyama anticipated in The End of History and the Last Man. Having argued that liberal democracy represented the final form of human political organisation, Fukuyama acknowledged a troubling conundrum: that citizens of such societies might find life insufficiently challenging and thus grow bored and restless in the absence of great struggles. He worried about a return to irrational politics, to nationalism and violence, as people sought meaning beyond the routines of consumption.
Fukuyama’s concern was prescient, but the form of disengagement has proven more diffuse than he imagined. The productive classes have not, by and large, embraced nationalist demagoguery or revolutionary ideologies. They have stopped trying. The energy that might once have gone into building enterprises, mastering professions, or accumulating capital now goes into lifestyle optimisation, credential arbitrage, or outright leisure. The result is a society that appears stable on the surface but is slowly consuming its own productive base – a kind of civilisational entropy that proceeds without drama or confrontation. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The Durants, in their masterpiece The Lessons of History, observed that concentrated ability is always at the mercy of distributed appetite. A productive minority may create the wealth that sustains a civilisation, but it cannot indefinitely resist a consuming majority determined to redistribute that wealth to itself. The mathematics are implacable: one productive citizen, however gifted, has only one vote, the same as one consuming citizen. When the consuming majority becomes large enough, no political mechanism can prevent it from voting itself transfers from the productive minority. The minority may complain, may organise, may attempt to flee—but it cannot, in a democracy, simply refuse to fund the majority’s consumption.
Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies argues that complex societies are elaborate problem-solving machines, adding layers of administration, specialisation, and infrastructure to address challenges as they arise. This complexity yields diminishing returns: each additional layer of bureaucracy or technology costs more and delivers less than its predecessor. Eventually, the costs of maintaining complexity exceed its benefits, and collapse (through accelerated simplification of complex structures) becomes preferable to continued investment in failing systems. In this framework, the productive classes are the engine of complexity: they generate the surplus that funds specialisation and infrastructure. When that surplus declines, whether through extraction, flight, or withdrawal, the society’s capacity to solve problems declines with it. The consuming majority may continue to vote for transfers, but there is progressively less to transfer.
The implication is uncomfortable to modern sensibilities: democracy, as currently constituted, may be structurally incapable of arresting this dynamic. The very mechanisms that make democracy legitimate – universal suffrage, majority rule, competitive elections – also make it vulnerable to capture by consuming majorities. The productive minority cannot, without abandoning democratic principles, disenfranchise those who drink more than they produce. But neither can it, within democratic constraints, protect itself from indefinite extraction. The system tends toward an equilibrium in which extraction continues until the productive base is exhausted, at which point the transfers become impossible, and the system collapses.
Lest this essay be mistaken for a defence of authoritarianism, it is worth noting that non-democratic regimes face the same problem. China, often cited as a counterexample of productive dynamism under authoritarian rule, has achieved remarkable growth precisely by privileging its productive classes: manufacturers, exporters, and engineers have enjoyed policy environments tailored to their needs. But this bargain rests on continued growth. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party derives, to a considerable extent, from its ability to deliver rising living standards. Should growth falter as demographic pressures accelerate, debt accumulates, and the hurdle of the middle-income trap looms, the consuming majority will demand its share. Authoritarian regimes may suppress such demands longer than democracies, but they cannot eliminate them. When the gravy train stops, the regime that built its legitimacy on material delivery may prove remarkably brittle in the end.
The problem, then, is not democracy as such but a particular political economy that has emerged across regime types: one in which consumption has been elevated above production. This political economy is not inevitable; it is the product of specific policy choices, ideological commitments, and institutional arrangements. It can, in principle, be reformed.
What would such reform require? At minimum: a rebalancing of incentives to favour production over consumption; lower taxes on investment and earned income, higher costs for unproductive rent-seeking; reform of transfer systems to reward contribution; and a cultural shift that honours makers over takers. These are not novel proposals; they recur in the literature of political economy from Adam Smith through Friedrich List and Joseph Schumpeter. What has been lacking is not diagnosis but political will. The consuming majority has no interest in reforms that would reduce its transfers, and the productive minority lacks the numbers to impose them democratically.
Perhaps the only path to reform lies in the exhaustion of alternatives. When the transfers become unsustainable and the productive base has shrunk to the point that it cannot fund the consuming majority’s expectations, then the system will face a choice between collapse and restructuring. Whether democracies or autocracies prove better able to navigate that moment remains an open question.
The historical record is not encouraging: societies that have allowed their productive classes to wither have rarely reformed peacefully. More often, they have experienced the age of “bread and circuses” that came to define the worst excesses of imperial Rome: a consuming populace kept quiescent by state provision until the provision fails, at which point order fails with it.
Those who care about liberty in the classical sense – the liberty of the productive citizen to enjoy the fruits of their labour, to build, to accumulate, and to transmit – have been insufficiently attentive to the conditions that make such liberty possible. They have assumed that democratic institutions, once established, would perpetuate themselves. They have not reckoned with the possibility that democracy, unmoored from a culture of production, might consume its own foundations. The age of consumption may yet prove a brief holiday from history, funded by accumulated capital that is now running out.
Whether we can extend that holiday or merely prepare for its end depends on whether the productive minority can find a voice in politics that speaks to their predicament and once again recognises their essential role in maintaining prosperous, orderly, and free societies.
Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine for the 21st century.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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