The Saving American Democracy Amendment—a fitting addition to my post on income inequality and unequal political representation, below.
Graph of the Day: How Rising Income Inequality Threatens Representative Democracy
By Benjamin Landy
Disillusionment is nothing new in political life. You might even call it the regular condition of the American voter. We continually set our hopes on the next ‘outsider’ candidate—the one who will finally change Washington—and then try not to flinch as the dream implodes. Of course, there is a good reason lawmakers rarely live up to their rhetoric: compromise in the face of political reality is a feature, not a bug, of the democratic process.
Still, it’s hard not to feel that this time has been different. The collapse of the credit market in 2008 precipitated an economic crisis that Congress has appeared unable (Democrats) or unwilling (Republicans) to solve. Income inequality has soared and millions remain out of work, but Washington remains gridlocked. With nowhere to turn, thousands have taken to the streets to express their frustration with a political system that no longer seems to represent their interests.
Sadly, Americans aren’t wrong to feel that way. According to a landmark study by economist Larry Bartels, wealthier and better-educated citizens are significantly more likely than the poor and less-educated to have their interests represented in Congress. For “incidental reasons of data availability,” Bartels examined Senatorial representation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to test his presumption that an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth was having an adverse effect on the political representation of specific income groups. What his analysis revealed was shocking, though expected: the interests of constituents in the upper third of the income distribution were weighted 50 percent more than those in the middle third, while the views of constituents in the bottom third received no weight at all in the voting decisions of their representatives.
The situation is almost certainly worse today. The wage gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent has grown by about a third since the time of Bartels’ original study, while the structural and institutional barriers to equal political representation have only intensified. Corporations and unions can now join together with individuals and other groups as “super PACs” to raise unlimited sums of money for candidates—now virtually a requirement for political campaigns that are more cost-prohibitive than ever—while a glut of new “voter ID” laws in conservative states discriminate against poor and minority voters that frequently vote Democrat. Campaign finance reforms like the McCain-Feingold Act are “dead,” as Senator McCain noted in the aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision on the Citizens United case, which lifted the restriction on corporate funding of political campaigns.
And, as Bartels observed in 2005, wealthier citizens remain significantly more likely to turn out to vote, contribute money to campaigns and to have direct contact with their public officials. Quoting political scientist Robert Dahl, he asks, “In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs?”
Commentators on both the right and left have taken to blaming this apparent disconnection on “crony capitalism” (a potent bit of political messaging that Democrats, for once, are hesitant to yield), although it means completely separate things to the different parties. For Republicans, crony capitalism is a story about bureaucratic villainy: government employees colluding with constituents to pad their pockets at the expense of the hardworking, independent taxpayer. Crony capitalism means entitlements, hand-outs and welfare queens, for which the only prescription is fiscal discipline and smaller government. The wealthy are not part of this story, except as its untold heroes, the “job creators.”
Liberals deploy the same term to refer to the corruption of government by corporations and lobbyists, and the wealthy who stand to benefit from both. Unfortunately this story—about how income inequality begets inequality of political representation—is all too real.
On Occupy Wall Street and Participatory Democracy
Participatory democracy can mean a lot of things, but Occupy Wall Street is certainly one of the things it means. I think others are correct to understand that when OWS protestors shout “This is what democracy looks like”, they are staking a claim for a particular vision of democracy that is opposed to the more sedentary, passive, poll-driven vision of representative interest-group democracy. It’s a vision in which democracy is not polls, campaigns, lobbying groups and PACs, but mike checks, general assemblies and direct action, in which people don’t just reactively register their preferences but go out into the public arena to engage each other, to develop and advocate and realise their visions for what society ought to do and be.
The larger point, though, is that calls for OWS activists to settle down and get busy with the humdrum mechanics of representative democratic politics misunderstand who many of these activists are, and what they want out of democratic political engagement. Many of those who came out for the demonstrations are mainstream people who’ve been radicalised by the situation, but at the movement’s core, you have a lot of people who basically believe that democracy is in the streets. In this they are the descendants of a vital utopian strand in American political history. And it’s not surprising that these are the kinds of people who’ve succeeded at putting inequality on the national political agenda, where more conventional interest-group, lobbying, think-tank or campaign-based efforts had failed.
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The participatory-democracy folks have never gone away; they’ve always been out there, from Emma Goldman and the Industrial Workers of the World to the New Left to Adbusters and OWS. And they’ll always be out there, because their kinds of utopian transformations are never going to be realisable projects. But the fact that they’re unrealisable doesn’t mean that people who are willing to invest their lives in striving for utopian transformation should stop. There will be a lot of people who got involved in OWS who now shift into more pragmatic applications of effort in the representative democratic sphere, and that’s great. But people who want to gather in spontaneous camps, hold come-one come-all general assemblies and try to radically re-envision the entire global social and economic system should keep on doing that too. They’re never going to see anything that we who think in terms of mainstream politics would understand as a “victory”. But they are a wellspring to which conventional representative politics periodically turns for inspiration and momentum, when the conventional mechanisms run out of torque.
