A Republican President is necessary to save the country

As the “problems” faced by America are undefined by the debate, in this round I shall discuss what I think they are, and how the Republican ideology appears to be incapable of solving them.1. Elite-dominated PoliticsI propose that a government is only democratic to the extent that it takes into account the interests of all people. A government that attaches primary importance to the interests of a small group is an oligarchy, and to the interests of the rich, a plutocracy. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln asserted that “corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed”.[1] In 1931, Dewey wrote that this is exactly the situation in America, declaring that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”.[2]The opinion of these mainstream American figures is confirmed by the evidence. Analysing 1,779 policy issues, Gilens and Page concluded that: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”.[3] Two further comments they make outline exactly what they mean: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it”, and “The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”[4]If I may assume that this is a problem, for I have plenty of space to develop on that later, then again I refer, extensively, to John Dewey, who criticised the solution that I presume a conservative president would adopt, in the highly unlikely event that he actually wanted to change the situation, which is reduce the size of the government and expand the private sector.Dewey wrote that the failures of the government, as we have shown that the government is dominated by economic elites, illustrate the: “incapacity of the captains of finance and industry to conduct the affairs of the country prosperously as an incident to the process of feathering their own nests. It would be ludicrous, were it not tragic, to believe that an appeal to the unregulated activities of those who have got us into the present crisis will get us out of it, provided they are relieved from the incubus of political action”.[5] He argues that the idea that the powerful and the privileged will solve the problem they have created if only they are given even more power is a solution just as rational as “eating a hair of a dog which bit you”.[6]2. Wealth InequalityWhether wealth inequality is actually a problem is heavily disputed; however, the previous argument I made concerning elite domination of the government should be a fairly compelling reason alone. Increasing wealth inequality could only have the effect of increasing the influence of the economic elite on society, as the elites will simply become even more elite and even more able to influence politics in their small numbers, since their power is derived from their supreme position in the economy. "Some people think it’s a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits," says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It’s possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don’t share in that gain”.[7]This is exactly what is happening, as documented in EPI’s The State of Working America, 12th Edition (Mishal et al. 2012). These are two crucial conclusions:“According to every major data source, the vast majority of U.S. workers—including white-collar and blue-collar workers and those with and without a college degree—have endured more than a decade of wage stagnation. Wage growth has significantly underperformed productivity growth regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity, or education level”[8]“This lost decade for wages comes on the heels of decades of inadequate wage growth. For virtually the entire period since 1979 (with the one exception being the strong wage growth of the late 1990s), wage growth for most workers has been weak. The median worker saw an increase of just 5.0 percent between 1979 and 2012, despite productivity growth of 74.5 percent—while the 20th percentile worker saw wage erosion of 0.4 percent and the 80th percentile worker saw wage growth of just 17.5 percent”[9]The Republican party line, as given by Mitt Romney, is that questioning the distribution of wealth is an expression of “envy”.[10] Republicans cannot be trusted to solve the problem of wealth inequality, which all demographic groups unwittingly confess is too extreme.[11] 3. The EnvironmentAnthropogenic climate change is supported by 97% of scientists.[12][13] The IPCC predict that in a high-emission scenario, global temperature will increase by approximately 4.5°C, as opposed to an increase of approximately 1.5°C in a low-emission mitigation scenario (relative to the estimated global temperature between 1850-1900).[14] The same report predicts that increases of above 4°C will make the risk of all major consequences of climate change either ‘high’ or ‘very high’,[15] though they note that even under all assessed scenarios, risk of adverse impact still remains.[16] The IPCC further writes that “Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time”, and that “It is virtually certain that aggregate estimates of costs mask significant differences in impacts across sectors, regions, countries and populations. In some locations and among some groups of people with high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity, net costs will be significantly larger than the global aggregate”.[17] The Republican position on the environment is near unforgiveable. “Unlike the current Administration, we will not pick winners and losers in the energy marketplace. Instead, we will let the free market and the public’s preferences determine the industry outcomes”.[18] The idea that private investors will throw money at the costly process of producing a renewable energy industry strong enough to complete with the immensely powerful and profitable oil and gas industry is pure fantasy; no one has ever made more money in a year than ExxonMobil ($50.24 billion).[19] The obvious conclusion of ‘leaving it to the free market’, however, does not bother Republicans, since “The environment is getting cleaner and healthier”.[20] I fail to see any reason why we should expect a Republican president to do anything to help avert this catastrophe. [1] The Lincoln Encyclopaedia: The Spoken and Written Words of A. Lincoln Arranged for Ready Reference, Shaw, A.H., p.40 (http://www.ratical.org...)[2] The Later Works, Dewey, J., p.163 (http://tinyurl.com...)[3] Gilens, M., and Page, B.I., Perspectives On Politics, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (http://journals.cambridge.org...)[4] Cited by Cassidy, J. in The New Yorker, ‘Is America an Oligarchy?’ (http://www.newyorker.com...)[5] Dewey, J., op. cit. [6] Ibid.[7] Cited by Greenhouse, S., The New York Times, ‘Our Economic Pickle’ (http://www.nytimes.com...)[8] Shierholz, H., and Mishel, L., A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class (http://tinyurl.com...)[9] Ibid.[10] [11] Norton, M.I., and Ariely, D., Perspectives on Psychological Science, ‘Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time (https://sdsuwriting.pbworks.com...)[12] NASA, Consensus (https://climate.nasa.gov...)[13] Abraham, J., and Nuccitelli, D., The Guardian, ‘The Wall Street Journal denies the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming’ (http://www.theguardian.com...)[14] IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability p. 13 (http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov...)[15] Ibid. p.13[16] Ibid. p.14[17] IPCC (http://www.ipcc.ch...)[18] Republican Platform, America’s Natural Resources https://gop.com...[19] http://en.wikipedia.org...[20] Republican Platform, op. cit.