Keane Bhatt — Progressive Policies Are Popular - So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?

A HuffPost/YouGov poll (6/20/13) found that 74 percent of the US public supports requiring companies to offer paid sick leave to their employees; paid maternity leave garnered 61 percent approval. In a number of recent polls, the idea of free community college received majority support (The Hill, 1/20/15)–one poll found that more Republicans favored the measure than opposed it, rather remarkable given that the idea was only recently popularized by President Obama himself.

So it's not voters' preferences that, in Blitzer's words, "could hurt Democrats" facing elections. A likelier reason is election funding. Political scientists Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson observed that politicians largely depended on financing from economic elites (AlterNet, 12/18/14) in what were probably the most expensive midterms in history (Washington Post, 10/22/14)

This is entirely consistent with first Chief Justice John Jay's view that the people who own the country should govern the country, making a lie of Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people and for the people." So much for the left in the United States. There is in effect one party, the party of the ruling elite, which fields two candidates for each office to create a façade of democracy.

Citi called this result "plutonomy." It is aptly characterized as "oligarchic democracy," as Aristotle foresaw in Politics. Wealth and power skew the selection process. Aristotle thought that true democracy could be best achieved by random selection using choice by lot, thereby eliminating class bias.

Truth out

Progressive Policies Are Popular - So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?

Keane Bhatt, FAIR | Op-Ed