Gabriel Rockhill — The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was

American history.

The Establishment and its propagandists regularly insist that a structural aristocracy is a “democracy” because the latter is defined by the guarantee of certain fundamental rights (legal definition) and the holding of regular elections (procedural definition). This is, of course, a purely formal, abstract and largely negative understanding of democracy, which says nothing whatsoever about people having real, sustained power over the governing of their lives.…

“Multivariate analysis indicates,” according to an important recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination […], but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy.”…

Indeed, if the United States is not a democracy today, it is in large part due to the fact that it never was one. Far from being a pessimistic conclusion, however, it is precisely by cracking open the hard shell of ideological encasement that we can tap into the radical forces that have been suppressed by it. These forces—not those that have been deployed to destroy them—should be the ultimate source of our pride in the power of the people.

In his rousing Gettysburg Address at the time of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln defined "democracy" as "government of the people, by the people and for the people." The definition is correct, but Lincoln misapplied it to the United States at the time, and that remains true today. In fact, the class hierarchy is more entrenched now than ever as shown by rising inequality of income and wealth, and the asymmetry of power.

Counterpunch
The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was

Gabriel Rockhill, Franco-American philosopher and cultural critic (public intellectual), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, and founding Director of the Atelier de Théorie Critique at the Sorbonne

Peter Radford — Plutocracy?

The 2012 Page, Bartels, and Seawright paper makes interesting reading. I came across it via the Krugman blog and recommend it to you all.

The key is that this is a first small attempt to quantify the difference in perspective between the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘general public’. The paper is thus an important step along the way towards understanding why it is that so much of our political discourse seems totally blind to the reality as experienced by the vast majority of our citizens.
If, like me, you have come to believe that our policy makers have a narrow focus and that their focus overlaps more with that of the wealthy and/or big business than it does with ordinary folk, then this paper is a start to getting empirical support for that feeling.
The paper’s concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full:

“Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their political preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy.”

This is the point: the ability of wealth to affect policy, substantially increased by recent trends and legal decisions, is subverting the very foundation of America’s self-image and self-justification. It is no longer a democracy, or is nearly so, and is rapidly declining into plutocracy.….

The Radford Free Press
Plutocracy?Peter Radford

Also Market Truths Or Obscured Views?

Dani Rodrik — How the Rich Rule

Widening inequality in the world’s advanced and developing countries inflicts two blows against democratic politics. Not only does it lead to greater disenfranchisement of the middle and lower classes; it also fosters among the elite a poisonous politics of sectarianism.…

These disheartening results raise an important question: How do politicians who are unresponsive to the interests of the vast majority of their constituents get elected and, more important, re-elected, while doing the bidding mostly of the wealthiest individuals? 

Part of the explanation may be that most voters have a poor understanding of how the political system works and how it is tilted in favor of the economic elite. As Gilens and Page emphasize, their evidence does not imply that government policy makes the average citizen worse off. Ordinary citizens often do get what they want, by virtue of the fact that their preferences frequently are similar to those of the elite. This correlation of the two groups’ preferences may make it difficult for voters to discern politicians’ bias. 

But another, more pernicious, part of the answer may lie in the strategies to which political leaders resort in order to get elected. A politician who represents the interests primarily of economic elites has to find other means of appealing to the masses. Such an alternative is provided by the politics of nationalism, sectarianism, and identity – a politics based on cultural values and symbolism rather than bread-and-butter interests. When politics is waged on these grounds, elections are won by those who are most successful at “priming” our latent cultural and psychological markers, not those who best represent our interests.

Project Syndicate
How the Rich Rule
Dani Rodrik | Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

Scholar Behind Viral 'Oligarchy' Study Tells You What It Means — Sahil Kapur interviews Martin Gilens

SK: Let's talk about the study. If you had 30 seconds to sum up the main conclusion of your study for the average person, how would you do so? 

MG: I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests.

SK: You say the United States is more like a system of "Economic Elite Domination" and "Biased Pluralism" as opposed to a majoritarian democracy. What do those terms mean? Is that not just a scholarly way of saying it's closer to oligarchy than democracy if not literally an oligarchy?

MG: People mean different things by the term oligarchy. One reason why I shy away from it is it brings to mind this image of a very small number of very wealthy people who are pulling strings behind the scenes to determine what government does. And I think it's more complicated than that. It's not only Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers or Bill Gates or George Soros who are shaping government policy-making. So that's my concern with what at least many people would understand oligarchy to mean. What "Economic Elite Domination" and "Biased Pluralism" mean is that rather than average citizens of moderate means having an important role in determining policy, ability to shape outcomes is restricted to people at the top of the income distribution and to organized groups that represent primarily -- although not exclusively -- business.

Talking Points Memo
Scholar Behind Viral 'Oligarchy' Study Tells You What It Means
Sahil Kapur interviews Martin Gilens, Professor of Politics at Princeton University