Capitalism in America, Part 2

Dear Friends,

In my last post, I said that capitalism as practiced in the United States has failed us both economically and politically, but deferred the discussion of its failure politically to this post.  The United States is supposed to be a democratic republic, i.e. a country where the majority rules except as limited by its constitution.  In the United States, our constitution has always contained a number of very un-democratic features.  Some of these features have been removed, e.g. slavery and only white male landowners can vote.  Others continue to exist, e.g. the Electoral College and each state gets two Senators.  In recent decades, gerrymandering by both major parties and voter suppression, primarily by Republicans have been added to these structural impediments to make the United States even less of a democratic republic.  Capitalism has failed us politically because as it is practiced in the United States, capitalism protects and enhances the money and power of the already rich and powerful at the expense of all the others and has, therefore, encouraged this movement away from a true democratic republic.

Electoral campaigns in the United States are bribery contests.  They are not at all democratic.  According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of American adults who contribute to a political party, campaign or organization has grown from 11% in 1992 to 15% in 2016 and 32% of households with income over $150,000 make such a contribution compared to just 7% of those with family income of less than $30,000 (here).  Making political contributions is for the wealthy.  According to Open Secrets, only 0.68% of US adults made political contributions in excess of $200 in 2016.  Of the $4,533,700,000 in political contributions in 2016, $2,606,200,000 or 57.5% were given by just 45,129 people or 0.018% of US adults.  The Open Secrets website has lots of very interesting and disturbing data (here).  If you have time, take a look.

There can be no logical or intellectually honest argument that our elected officials are not impacted by the people who make big contributions more than they are by those who make little or no contributions.  Consider for example that in the days leading up to the passage of Trump's tax bill, somewhere around 55% of the American people we opposed to the law and about one-third were in favor of the law.  Nevertheless, Congress passed it because the big Republican donors demanded it.  Or consider that when the FCC repealed the net neutrality rules 80+% of Americans were in favor of keeping them, including over 70% of Republicans, but the big Republican donors demanded the repeal.   I could go on and on, but you can provide examples of your own.

While there is some debate around the edges of the amount of influence of money in our elections, there is a clear consensus that it is extremely influential, particularly in state and local races.  Capitalism in the United States has led to gross inequality in both income and wealth and hence power, including the ability to contribute to and hence influence the outcome of elections.  Capitalism has allowed rich donors the ability to unduly influence local elections which has enabled state legislatures to gerrymander both state and congressional districts.  This gerrymandering in recent elections has led to the Republicans winning far more seats in state legislatures and Congress than the number of people voting for them (in the aggregate) would justify.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from an Associated Press analysis (here):

The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010.The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.

While gerrymandering often has racial overtones because people of color tend to vote for candidates from the Democratic Party, voter suppression efforts lead by state legislatures are more overtly racial and with the same effect to keep the rich (primarily white) in power.

We should try to remove the influence of money from politics, but money will always equate to power.  Our form of capitalism protects and enhances the wealth (and therefore power) of the already rich (white) and prevents all others from achieving a level of income or wealth to challenge the economic and political status quo.  We need to constrain our current capitalism so that it provides for true equality of opportunity which is the only way that we will be able to say that capitalism as practiced in the United States is an economic system that advances the economic interests and provides better living conditions for all in a sustainable manner.  How to accomplish that result is the topic of another post.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal