Democracy II
It’s sort of amusing. Various segments of the American oligarchy have been all about democracy over the last couple years. Not that any of them could explain what it is, or if they gave any real thought about it, wouldn’t much care for it. Case in point is an Op/Ed in the NYT. The writer, who over the years has so completely discredited himself there’s no reason to read anything he writes, but I was perversely click baited — “The Cure for What Ails Our Democracy.”
A cure necessitates a diagnosed ailment. The first sentence shows the author hasn’t a clue, “America is economically thriving but politically dysfunctional.” It’s a through the looking glass experience to observe America’s “elite” continually dropping America is politically dysfunctional. I can tell you how for decades, you were immediately marginalized from anything associated with the American political class for any such suggestion. “You’re cynical.” “You’re unrealistic about how things work.” Hah, fuck, I still hear it today.
What happened was Trump. Most amusing, it was Trump’s success in declaring the system broke that forced the issue. If he was gone, they’d bury all notions of dysfunction as deep as they could.
The idea America is an economically vibrant place but politically dysfunctional goes back forty years to Ronald Reagan. The solution then was simply to take everything possible out of the hands of government, except the funding, and give it to big corporations. This is politics in itself, but by claiming it was economics, the politics was removed, certainly any notion it might all be radically anti-democratic.
Today, after a half-century, we see this economics led to the greatest concentration of wealth, in the fewest hands, in American history. Asset prices reach ever greater heights, while debt explodes across every sector of society, an ever growing percentage of the population debt peons — a thriving economy.
There is no separation between the economy and politics. Democracy, if it is about nothing else, is about how power is distributed. Massively concentrated economic power means no democracy. Just as importantly, to say the economy today is thriving ignores the continuation of environmental degradation both in America and across the planet, no economy thrives for long destroying its ecological roots.
If people at the top of a broken system claim it’s broke, it’s against not only their interests, but beyond their abilities to offer insightful assessments of what’s ailing it, thus a complete inability to change in any sort of helpful way. Really, truly, it would be nice to have a robust discussion about democracy in the 21st century.