Odd glimpses, like the item from the NYTimes I posted yesterday on members of the Republican Party vying for big donations to help them get elected make you wonder where our democracy is going.
I have a couple of books, one I'm reading and the other I've read, that argue that it already has gone. The book I'm reading is Chris Hedges' "Death of the Liberal Class". As usual, Hedges swamps you with information and gets some things wrong. For example, we find the Michael Ignatieff is leader of the Canada's Labor Party. Hmmm... As far as I've read, Hedges quite strongly makes the point that the political forces that made a strong case for the little man, for the working class and unionization, and for widespread participatory democracy in the US, are gone. The liberal class has been co-opted by the wealthy and powerful who really don't care what state the US is in as long as their power and wealth grows. So we still have people like Obama who say nice things intended to make people compliant and happy, but who can no longer do those nice things. And it gets worse. Big business has intruded itself into a lot of things government does. Hedges argues that a large part of the US military procedure in Afghanistan or other theatres of hostility or war is carried out by private companies that need and therefore promote continuous large military and security expenditures to grow their wealth. Hence the lobbyists; hence the Dick Cheneys and Halliburtons. In reading Hedges, you soon find that you are reading an argument and not a conclusion that is found after posing a question and undertaking careful research. Another book I've been reading recently tends to do the latter. It's "Winner-Take-All Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, two political scientists. Hacker and Pierson examine the period from the 1970s to the present and find a very large shift wealth from the bottom and middle classes of American society to the uppermost classes. While all classes gained some income between 1979 and 2006, the incomes of the top one percent of all recipients increased by 256%! By 2007, the richest one percent received some 23% of all of the income earned or accruing to Americans. Along with this upward redistribution, the power of unions diminished, unemployment rose and the political clout of the middle class faded away. We Canadians like to look upon our neighbors to the south with a little disdain. Hey, we're not like that, we tell ourselves. Well, perhaps we are, at least a little. Hacker and Pierson have a chart that shows that Canada's top income recipients were not very far behind their US counterparts between 1973 and 2000. During that period, the share of income held by the US top one percent rose from about 7% to about 16%, whereas in Canada it rose from over 8% to over 12%. So, what's all this mean? There's a lot of verbiage out there about the US declining economically while the BRICs, especially China, are rising. Historically and even today, America is considered the world's principal democracy, "the shining city on the hill". China is not a democracy. It's an outstanding example of state capitalism in which the state counts, not the citizen. Does it matter that democracy is sinking, that the common man's power is fading? Well, to ever so many people who have lost jobs, who cannot pay their bills, and who cannot save for retirement, it matters a great deal. It also matters to the idealist who believes in the shining city. But to the few, the top one percent or so, it really can't matter very much. The economy, whether national or global, is moving in their direction. And, like Obama, they can say the right things without really meaning what they say. Ed
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