Americans believe in calling a spade a spade. Neither do the best universities in the world. Currently, even though America has the world’s freest and most freely independent media, no major newspaper calls America a plutocracy.
Why not? To deal with a problem, one must first acknowledge that there is a problem to deal with. The only brutally honest answer that one can give to these painful questions is No. The existential question that American society faces today is whether it can escape from the clutches of plutocracy after it has taken hold of American society.
PLUTOCRACY VS DEMOCRACY FULL
Two Princeton university economists, Case and Deaton, have also documented that there is a “sea of despair” among working-class Americans.Įnjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Nicholas Kristof links this deterioration to “deaths of despair,” commenting sadly that one quarter of the kids who rode his school bus are now dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide. It slipped from number 19 position in 2011 to number 28 in 2020. The latest Social Progress Index, which measures wellbeing in societies across several dimensions, shows that America is the only major developed society which has seen a deterioration in human wellbeing in many areas. Living in Athens 2,400 years ago, Socrates warned that cities that allowed themselves to be rule by the wealthy would have a “poor voyage.” This is exactly what has happened to America. Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. This has proved a big step on the journey towards becoming a plutocracy.” Diplomat Brief Weekly Newsletter N Martin Wolf says the “the Supreme Court’s perverse 2010 ‘Citizens United’ decision held that companies are persons and money is speech. It gave those with money the green light to spend unlimited sums on ads and other political tools to ensure the election of candidates sensitive to their interests. The power of money in determining political outcomes in America was given a major boost by the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision of January 2010. This is the reverse of how meritocracy should work.”
The result, as Edward Luce says, is that “studies show that an eighth grade (14-year-old) child from a lower income bracket who achieves maths results in the top quarter is less likely to graduate than a kid in the upper income bracket scored in the bottom quarter. By weakening government, America has also taken away equality of opportunity. The slide began with Ronald Reagan saying that “government is not the solution government is the problem.” In most countries, especially in Europe, governments play a critical role in counter-balancing market forces and ensuring a level playing field for all citizens. How did the 1 percent seize both greater political and economic control in America? The answer is complex. Hence, they sadly conclude “in the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” Two Princeton University political scientists, Gilens and Page, have documented in detail how political outcomes in America reflect the interests of the wealthy, not the mass voters. Anand Giridharadas, a former New York Times columnist, has observed that in terms of income increase since 1980, “that of the top 1 percent has more than tripled and that of the top 0.001 percent has risen more than seven-fold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same.” But the wealthy are not satisfied with seizing more wealth.
The wealthy have seized most of the new wealth. What’s the evidence for this claim? It’s massive. Teddy Roosevelt also warned, “of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.” Yet despite these warnings, America has gone from a democracy towards becoming, for all practical purposes, a plutocracy, moving away from a government of the people, by the people and for the people to a government “of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%,” as noted by the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates warned of the dangers of selecting captains of ships by their wealth. Throughout human history, wise men have warned of the dangers of plutocracy.
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