Democracy Building?

Marketplace
Thursday, May 13, 2004

While we've been busy obsessing about whether democracy can be established in the disorder of Baghdad, we should start thinking about whether it can survive inequality on America.

The Bush administration continues to argue that bringing private market capitalism to Iraq and Afghanistan is more or less tantamount to democratizing those countries.

But here at home, it turns out that free market capitalism may actually be de-democratizing America. That is the disturbing conclusion of a new American Political Science Association Report to be released later this month.

That is the disturbing conclusion of a new American Political Science Association report to be released later this month. It notes that disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in other nations. And that gaps between races and ethnic groups persist.

What's that mean to you? It means upward mobility of the few has not offset the economic disparities among the many. It means that the dominance of the advantaged has solidified. While government has been loosening its hold over corporations, big money has strengthened its hold over government.

This while the political voice of those on the economic margins grows weaker. Right now, nearly every adult member of families with incomes over 75 thousand dollars reports voting in presidential elections. But in families living on 15 thousand dollars a year, only half the adults vote.

Our democracy's one person, one vote formula cannot long withstand such enduring inequalities. Inequalities, I might add, bred of lack of skills, motivation, and networks that the better advantaged pick up through formal education and occupational advancement.

This sober Report is a product not of alarmist radicals or pink-hued publicity-mongers but of fifteen sober academics from universities like Harvard, George Mason, Yale, Minnesota, and the University of Maryland.

And what this report is telling us is that even as we sell democracy abroad, it's in trouble right here in River City. That's not because the market isn't working, but because the market is working all too well at reinforcing inequalities, in the absence of any serious effort by government to control it.

In so doing, we are undermining the promise of American democracy.

But is anybody listening?

In New York, this is Ben Barber for Marketplace.

A Failure of Democracy, Not Capitalism

Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

MPR Marketplace: Ads & Taxes Commentary

MPR Marketplace: 9/11 and Lincoln Commentary

Mutual Aid Society on a Grand Scale

War talk deserves skepticism, not a blank check

Rebuilding Iraq: The Problem of Democracy

Our War's Mistaken Premise

Democracy cannot coexist with Bush's failed doctrine of preventive war

It isn’t about the economy -- it's about hypocrisy

Democracy Building?