Three Threats to Our Democracy

Dear Friends,

Our democracy is facing three significant threats, which I believe are interconnected.  They are control by a small economic elite, voter disenfranchisement and declining education.  These three threats create a vicious circle of declining opportunity, centralized control among a few, increasing economic disparity and voter suppression.

A recent study by Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern (here) entitled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" raises the spectrum that America is more like an oligarchy than a democracy.  I have to admit that I did not read the entire report and perhaps did not fully understand all that I read.  Nevertheless, I did understand this paragraph from the abstract.

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. 

I also did read completely an article in The New Yorker by John Cassidy entitled "Is America an Oligarchy?" (here).  That article ends with the following paragraph:

Me, too. There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort policy in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the majority: the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.

Of course our democracy has faced this threat many times in the past.  Doris Kearns Goodwin's book entitled The Bully Pulpit contains a wonderful history of the immense economic and political control of a few people in the heyday of the trusts before Teddy Roosevelt began to break them up.  After a period of time where anti-trust laws were obeyed and enforced, we are once again in an era where political and economic power are concentrated in the hands of a very few.

Voter suppression is also on the rise in the United States.  We have of course faced voter suppression in the past and been able to overcome it.  But clearly it is on the rise again today.  Norm Ornstein wrote an article in The Atlantic entitled "The U.S. Needs a Constitutional Right to Vote" (here).

In his article, Mr. Ornstein points out that the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee the right to vote.  I will simply quote a couple of paragraphs from his article.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, is leading to a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era—this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.

 Voter suppression is nothing new in America, as the pre-civil-rights era underscores. But it is profoundly un-American. The Texas law, promoted aggressively by state Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP choice for governor in next year's election, establishes the kinds of obstacles and impediments to voting that are more akin to Vladimir Putin's Russia than to the United States.

The effort should be accelerated. We need a modernized voter-registration system, weekend elections, and a host of other practices to make voting easier. But we also need to focus on an even more audacious and broader effort—a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote.
Many, if not most, Americans are unaware that the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. To be sure, such a right is implicit in the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth amendments that deal with voting discrimination based on race, gender, and age. But the lack of an explicit right opens the door to the courts' ratifying the sweeping kinds of voter-restrictions and voter-suppression tactics that are becoming depressingly common. 

I could not have said it better.  I am proud to point out that my Representative in Congress, Keith Ellison, and another Representative have introduced a Constitutional amendment.  Of course, it will go nowhere with the Republicans in charge of the House.

The third threat is the decline of education in the United States.  Thomas Jefferson was very clear that we needed an educated electorate for our democracy to thrive.  Here are just a couple of his quotations on the subject.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

If you do not believe that education is rapidly declining in the United States just Google "decline of education in the United States".  You will find no shortage of studies and articles documenting the decline.  Clearly, Jefferson was right that you need an educated populace.  If we are to provide anything that approaches equality of opportunity, we need to provide a great education to people.

The problem is that even if we can take back the power from the economic elite (or oligarchs if you want to be more direct) and even if we can assure the right to vote, without an involved and educated electorate our democracy will fail.  Just as we have overcome threats from the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few and voter suppression.  We can overcome the threat of the decline in education too.

We need to elect politicians that have the courage and the conviction to fight for all the people, and that will require getting people to vote.  So do whatever you can to get out the vote.  You will be helping to save our democracy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal