The Blog

2021-

2021-11-07 j
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION X

Is the U.S. political system a democracy, or oligarchy?

Put bluntly, is the Democratic Party an agent of democracy, or oligarchy? The past month’s Congressional debacle confirms Aristotle description of democracy: Many states have constitutions that are democratic in form, he wrote, but actually are oligarchies.

The reason, he explained, is that democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies as a result of the increasing concentration and polarization of wealth. That gives the leading families control of the political system. (In his schema, oligarchies aim at making themselves hereditary aristocracies.)

The translation of wealth into political control has been accelerating since the 1980s, and almost all increase in U.S. wealth and income in the year and a half since the Covid-19 outbreak struck in spring 2020 has accrued to the One Percent in the form of rising stock, bond and real estate prices. In the non-financial economy, prices charged by the oil, pharmaceutical and IT monopolies have also increased, while housing prices have risen nearly 20 percent in the last twelve months. These sectors are the largest lobbyists and political campaign contributors.

The Democratic leadership policy is to back the candidates who are able to raise the most money. For most candidates the lion’s share comes from these lobbyists and special interests, for whom their donations are a business investment. Only a minority of progressive candidates have been able to raise enough in small sums from many individuals to become political players.

The situation is much like that of ancient Rome. Its constitution organized voting according to wealth cohorts, mainly measured by land ownership. The wealthiest Senatorial class, followed by the equite “Knights”, were assigned voting weight overshadowing that of the 99 Percent. In the United States, to be sure, all votes on election day are counted equally, but in practice the One Percent limit the range of policies that can be voted on and then implemented. The first problem is how to be nominated in the first place and vie with rivals in the political primaries. In America, success requires support from the Donor Class. Similarly in Rome, to succeed as a candidate running for office required heavy backing by the wealthy. (Crassus played this role, financing Caesar’s campaign, among others.) Leading politicians tended to be heavily in debt to their backers.

In the United States, the debt is not as crassly monetary. What is owed to donors is political support. The job description for a politician is to deliver voter support to one’s campaign contributors. That is how oligarchies suppress democracy, today as in the Roman Republic.

Centrists and moderates support existing oligarchic trends in economic polarization

Upon taking office, President Biden said that nothing would really change. This was the opposite of Barack Obama’s slogan of “hope and change,” but it was simply more honest. The Biden Administration not only has maintained Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, it has increased them under the BBB’s SALT provision. Biden has extended offshore oil drilling rights, and policies benefiting the financial and corporate sectors.

This is called being a “centrist” or “moderate.” If the world is polarizing between the One Percent and the 99 Percent, between creditors and debtors, monopolists and consumers, where is the middle ground? The Chinese have a proverb: “He who comes to a fork in the road and tries to go two roads at once will get a broken hip joint.” Being a moderate means not interfering with the economic trends that are polarizing the U.S. economy between the rentier One Percent at the top and the increasingly indebted 99 Percent.

That is the situation confronting today’s economy. Refusing to take steps to change the dynamics that are enriching the oligarchy means not reversing or even slowing the trends that are polarizing the economy. The Democratic Party leadership has opposed the influence of the Progressive Congressional Caucus from the beginning. This is oligarchy, not democracy. It is not even the largely empty formalities of political democracy, to say nothing of substantive economic democracy.

What really is democracy, after all? It is the ability of voters to get legislated the policies that they want – and which presumably are in their economic and social interests. But the process is manipulated by the DNC’s reliance on the Donor Class. Its political program is simply a marketing vehicle, with no “truth in advertising” regulation.

The question is, can it be reformed? Can democracy succeed without replacing the Democratic Party leadership. Indeed, can it succeed without an altogether different political system from today’s Democratic-Republican duopoly with its common set of donors?

What I cannot understand is why the Progressive Caucus has not insisted on naming their own supporters to the DNC.

The current Democratic impasse shows that no progress can be made without changing the institutional structure of American politics. It seems that the only way to do this is to make sure that the Democratic Party loses so irrevocably in 2022 and 2024 that it is dissolved enough to enable the Progressives to revive the near corpse. (read more)

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
— H. L. Mencken

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
— H. L. Mencken

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
— H. L. Mencken

“Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted”
— H. L. Mencken

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