There is plenty to criticize from a radical perspective in Thurow's and Longworth's more extensive formulations on the question. The great western conflation of democracy with capitalism originated with the crisis of European feudalism and the great European and North American bourgeois revolutions of the 17th to l9th centuries. It also disguised the real nature of leading First World states. The candidate-selection and policymaking processes belong primarily to the top 10 percent of Americans that own 73.2 percent of American wealth. This makes retreat from politics into a seemingly rational life choice for ordinary citizens, as was acknowledged with exceptional candor last July by mainstream media pundit William Pfaff.
Money rules government.
Moreover, the transformation probably is irreversible. Activists and intellectuals trying to spark resistance to these facts of American political life struggle to get their message through a system in which less than 10 giant corporations control more than 50 percent of the country's electronic and print media. Few if any aspects of contemporary capitalism are less democratic than precisely its tendency towards globalization. Capital seeks through globalization to evade, subvert, and preclude popular and governmental regulation and to roll back labor power. This phenomenon is also explicitly acknowledged in the mainstream media of the post-Cold War era, when the seeming absence of anticapitalist ideological enemies seems to create new frankness on the part of the U.S. intelligentsia.