The article implies that the U.S. is not a democracy, but oligarchy and democracy aren't mutually exclusive. I'd say the U.S. (and most Western countries) is both and always has been. Voters certainly have influence in the U.S. but it's limited, just like everywhere else.
I'm not sure this is true. When the highest vote-getter wins, despite the lack of an absolute majority, that gives a better chance to third-party candidates in a multi-candidate election.
The reason third parties fare so poorly in the US is that the two major parties have a duopoly on campaign fundraising and free news coverage, which is a vicious circle. The media covers only candidates who are "electable", and they judge who's electable based on their ability to raise money, but you can't raise any money if nobody knows about you, and nobody will know about you if you don't get media coverage or don't have the money to spread your message.
This is why self-funded billionaire Ross Perot was the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in recent times.
In the us, political groups for coalitions before the election happens. This is in contrast to most European countries where they set up the coalitions afterwards. Groups occasionally migrate between the parties and the us is in one such realignment now.
In the same way, the obvious solution to a one-party system is to overthrow the government, whereas with a two-party system, you're supposed to fight within the system... and mostly accomplish nothing, because those in power have overlapping interests.
And who's gonna do that when the government has a monopoly?
What do you mean exactly? This seems a little too vague.
Going away from parties to actual individual person voting on each topic/decision would be actual democracy but not like that has no drawbacks.
> "[...] the fiftieth income percentile—that is, [...] the preferences of the average citizen"
> "[...] “affluent” Americans at the ninetieth income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the opinions of wealthy or very-high-income Americans [...] about $146,000 in annual household income"
Their conclusion:
> "This evidence indicates [...] policy is consistent with majority preferences roughly two-thirds of the time; that public policy changes in the same direction as collective preferences a similar two-thirds of the time [...]"
> "Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites [...] have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do."
They forgot to mention that income is a strong indicator of voter turn out[0]; "economic elites" vote in higher numbers with a gap of around 20-30% depending on source and year. Also, voter turnout is pretty low to start with at around 50-60%.
So, now we have a better understanding of who actually votes instead of surveying the "average" citizen if they agree with policies as this study does compared to the policies favored by the "elite".
The conclusion read with the added voter facts is: The higher the income the more likely to actually vote; Elected government officials work to create policies that favors the people who voted for them; People who turn out to vote in greater numbers have all the actual policy influence (they also currently have increasingly higher incomes than those who don't vote). Well no shit, they said it themselves "Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections [...]" sound like democracy is working. Therefore, if the "average" citizen surveyed here doesn't like the policy they are well within their rights to hold their representative responsible by getting themselves and 3 vote-eligible friends/family members to go vote. This especially includes the primaries. The "elite" do.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251338441
What is more important is: is it working? And if not, why not?
Because, per the linked research, in present-time USA that weight is ~zero.
Which is especially interesting considering the USA's narratives about itself. And how, it seems to me, its population is so invested in said narratives that it will defend those even in the face of contrary research. You'd think a culture so invested in its self-determination would be angry about this result and endeavor to do something about it.
It is pretty safe to say that the US could be more democratic. It is probably reasonable to compare it to other countries in terms of how democratic it is. But saying it is "not a democracy" is a fairly trivial observation. Republics aren't technically democracies if democracy means that the people make the decisions and win on all the disagreements. Republics are modelled on places like Rome that had a very visible and powerful oligarchy.
This statement applies to absolute monarchies as well; we have many examples from history where the people have "really put their foot down" and won concessions from that form of government. I don't see how this is enough to call the system democratic.
In Slovenia or Denmark, there may be two degrees of separation fewer between the regular voter and, say, an ordinary MP, because the parliaments and government are about the same size, but the population is in single millions. Even here in Czechia quite a lot of people actually know personally some high-ranking politician.
How many Americans are on friendly terms with their Rep or Senator?
I would imagine if you limited this to folks with $100MM+ net worth, the percentage wouldn't be so low.
It's always “working”, the question is for whom.
I still think about the Bonobos a lot.
The US already has one of the weakest social safety nets in the Western world, it has military-spec weaponised police with little to no oversight, it has a political system ripe for abuse with the electoral college and gerrymandering running rife, and it has a political legacy of "it doesn't matter what you do to win, as long as you win", which allows racism to dictate voting rights. It's an attitude (along with a lot of the other political institutions) that hasn't been updated since Victorian times.
There's a lot of things I would not agree with, with any of the political leadership of the UK, but I wouldn't expect any of them - even the worst in my eyes - to separate children from families, prevent them from taking their medicine, lock them up in desert camps where rape and abuse are rife, and then remove them to remote locations with no record of where they went. Human trafficking, organised by the US government, for the profit of the rich. Not content with legal slavery for the imprisoned, they implemented it for migrants too. Migrant children.
I'm genuinely not sure if the US is capable of reversing its current course. I'm not even sure it's worth trying without a huge shift in opinion for the public who vote these rat-bastards in. Again. After the human-trafficking came to light...
In reality these systems are designed to absorb your effort and direct it into time sinks that either serve those in power
Want to change things? First "we" need to take back the house by phone-banking for this blue dog
Chip in $5 today to help Chuck Schumer win back the Senate
We're going to "show Trump" with a big attendance at the next No Kings rally
This is certainly the case with many protests in many contexts, but there are ways to protest that make the powerful worried and ways that reassure them they really have nothing to worry about. There have been many protest movements that were organized to affect change and succeeded in doing so.
What's more, people aren't showing up to these events thinking "this will certainly not effect change but may help me meet people". Once they get a clue that there's no potential for change they'll stop showing up.
Really? I don't know anyone that thinks that. Everyone I know think, "I'm not a billionaire, so of course there is nothing I can do."
"It's similar to how people are led to believe anyone could have a billion dollars if only they were smarter and/or worked harder."
Ha ha, well there you are. I also know no one that believes that either. But of course if someone believes the latter, the former follows. ;-)
I always try to consider a possible biased view, but again seen it summarized it like this makes it extremely simple and clear.
* More sharing of political power with ethnic, class or cultural outgroups
* Less revenues for the oligarchy from land ownership, investment in healthcare and investment in finance (other investment sectors would do better, however)
* Greater civil and criminal penalties for civil or criminal wrongdoing by oligarchs, their loved ones and their class allies (e.g. the affluenza case)
Even installing something like Juche and losing internationally to China in every way is preferable to having any one of these go forward, at least to their perspective.
The Constitution was oligarchic by design of the founding oligarchs, who stated explicitly that the point of the "checks and balances" was actually to stop majoritarianism.
If you look at decision making at high levels, the general population usually gets ignored. Instead, powerful special interests dominate the government.
Particularly with regard to foreign affairs of the USA, the oil lobby and weapons manufacturers. And look who's benefiting from the current state of affairs in Ukraine, Iran and Venezuela: US arms manufacturers and oil companies.
On the other hand in many ways people in the USA are extroardinarly free, there's pretty good protection of freedom of speech.
Unless you try criticising the president......
That is to say, anybody _in power_ or any in any position of authority is significantly curtailing their criticism of Trump. If you haven't noticed this by now, then I despair. Frankly it's unimportant what the little guy says about Trump. The little guys speech is 'free', but the moment the little guy is in a position of power, watch the US administration silence him.
BTW: Being 'silenced' doesn't mean being carted off to prison. It means the Trump taking away your authority, reputation, career and/or livelihood. That is all that is required.
We've intentionally reduced everyone's say in everything around them with state/fed regulation and the whole "make it cost too much to be viable on its face but then give them a grant/tax break/other favorable treatment to make it work if they jump through the right hoops" paradigm that's permeated damn near everything.
The US has slid below Hungary in democracy, Hungary was also straight sliding towards dictatorship. Hungary did a 180 though by electing Peter Maygar. Hopefully the US can do a 180 in the midterms.
Otherwise it will probably slide in to being a full Oligarchy like Russia.
To me this crazy thing is the complete lack of alarm or sense of urgency from Americans on this. They seem very subdued and very complacent regarding this change.
Considering TFA is from 2014 and knowing the Democratic Party, I think instead of a 180 you could at best expect a 20
Reading about the way democracy was done in Athens, both are at 0.
In Athens, they had some 5000 people gathering together to vote every week on various matters out of the total population of around 20000 (the others were women, slaves and immigrants).
The judicial system was organized into 10 courts of 500 randomly assigned people from the above 5000.
They regularly forced the most prominent politicians to emigrate so that they do not become excessively influential.
Once Sparta took over Athens, the decision-making was restricted to 500 people first, then to the 30 tyrants.
P.S. IIRC, they had both secret and public voting.
P.P.S. Most public jobs were assigned randomly, except those that required specialized skills.
At its founding, the United States allowed widespread slavery and granted the vote only to white males, disenfranching women and black men.
> They regularly forced the most prominent politicians to emigrate so that they do not become excessively influential.
This sounds like a good idea to me.
Other politicians were simply too thick to hear what people's concerns were so they voted for someone else.