Response to "American Democracy in an Age of Inequality"

by Frances Fox Piven, Graduate School of the City University of New York he APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy's Report (2004), American Democracy in an Age of Inequality, concludes that progress toward realizing our ideals of democracy "may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed" as a result of growing inequality. Political participation, whether through voting, or campaign contributions, or organizational activities, reflects the distribu tion of economic resources, and as resources come to be more unequal, so is participation increasingly skewed toward the better-off. As a result, the Report goes on to argue, the issues and positions of the affluent are heard by poli ticians, and louder voices give the affluent greater influence. I agree with this conclusion, so far as it goes. Disparities in voting, money, and organization matter in the political process, and economic inequalities inevitably affect these disparities. None of this is new, of course. While inequalities have increased dur ing the past three decades, they have increased during earlier periods in American history. This is normal politics in the United States, some times worse, sometimes better. However, I think that forcing the problems of the contemporary period in the United States into this very familiar mold may be mislead ing, for it encourages us to understate the seri ousness of the demo cratic distortions resulting from ongoing changes in American politics. Our problems are not just the result of skewed participation, of the familiar under representation of the least-well-off and the over-representation of the middleand upper middle-class, in voting, organizational partici pation, and therefore in the calculations of in cumbents. Rather we should pay more attention to the politics of extreme wealth concentration, the culture of greed and arrogance it has en couraged, and the stratagems the wealthy now deploy to control formally democratic institu tions. It is this development that underpins the political regime that now controls all branches of the federal government. Although the regime defers, sometimes ambivalently, to the rituals of elections, it operates not like a democracy, responsive to multitudes of voters who partici pate in normal politics, but like a political ma chine that uses propaganda, deception, and clientelism to win voters, while the public poli cies it promotes reward a narrow stratum of machine players. The machine, like all political machines, works to systematically convert public pro grams into private political spoils.' It includes Republican party operatives, top corporate lobbyists, leading conservative think tanks, business-funded advocacy groups, the organiza tions of the Christian right, and much of the mass media. So arrogant has the machine be come that its new "K Street strategy" threatens to punish lobbyists who also contribute to the opposition party, no matter that doing so is traditional business practice.2 Corporate ma chine players open Washington offices, launch Political Action Committees, flood electoral campaigns with contributions, and beef up the trade associations that are now virtually a branch of government. Lobbyists intrude into the inner workings of government, politicians leave office to morph into business executives, while other business executives morph into politicians. The machine took over the Republican party, pouring money into the electoral campaigns of hard-right candidates, and pushing older-style conservatives to the margins. But the real mea sure of its political success was its influence on the Democratic party. Franklin Delano Roose velt had talked of "strong central government as a haven of refuge to the individual."3 By the 1990s, this tenet of the 20th-century Democrats was jettisoned, and the machine played a key role. The Clinton presidency is a good illustra tion. The machine had worked to turn welfare into a metaphor for African Americans, sexual license, and liberalism. In 1992, Bill Clinton made his bid for the presidency on the slogan of "ending welfare as we know it." As the 1996 election approached, the machine held Clinton's feet to the fire with their proposal for rolling back welfare called the Personal Re sponsibility and Work Opportunity Reconcilia tion Act. He turned for advice to his pollsters and consultants. Dick Morris told him to "fast forward the Gingrich agenda." "Progressives," argued Clinton pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, "needed to transcend welfare politics."4 Clin ton signed the measure. The Democratic strat egy, in a nutshell, was to beat the Republicans by adopting their positions.5 The machine is also a powerful presence in the mass media. Democratic deliberation in a large and modern society depends on the media to inform the citizenry about their political world. In the United States, political informa tion and interpretation is hostage to a mass media under increasingly consolidated corpo rate control, and allied with the machine. Rela tively little deeply controversial news is likely to make its way onto the main airwaves or into print. The Downing Street memos that reported Pentagon planning for an invasion of Iraq was