Elections matter … Right?

by
Peter Radford
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from Peter Radford

Well, only if those being elected have an inkling of what their constituents actually want.  And it seems that, here in America at least, there is a considerable gulf between what those who are elected think are the key issues and what those who do the electing think of as the key issues.  The lack of overlap is distinctly upsetting.

We are constantly being told that the US is a relatively conservative nation.  This is why some of the more obvious social democratic remedies for our economic and social ills are considered as beyond the pale. They won’t fly here, we are told, because Americans won’t go for them.

This is odd when we think about how extremely popular programs like Social Security for retirees and Medicare for the elderly are.  Despite the regularity with which the Republican party derides such programs, and despite the dire predictions that said programs will reduce America to some version of abject Soviet-style penury, the voting public simply loves them.  Getting rid of them is impossible.  This is why the only approach that remains to our political right is to starve the government of revenue sufficient to pay for “entitlement programs” so that the debate is shifted away from their efficacy and towards their affordability.  No one doubts their efficacy.  But we seem always to be discussing their affordability.  The US, we are told, despite being the wealthiest economy on earth, just can’t afford entitlements.

Even that word: “entitlements” is an attempt to pervert the narrative.  It makes the programs in question sound as if they are gross luxuries that require the pillaging of one person’s wealth in order to satisfy that of others who feel  entitled to something that is not rightly theirs.  So instead of being a reward for, or right of, citizenship social programs are presented purely as a burden on those unfortunate enough to have sufficient wealth to pay taxes.

The poor dears!

In any case, the gap between the perspective of our elected officials, their staffs, and the commentariat who opine on such matters, and the actual perspective of voters has reached a critical level.  I submit that the gap accounts for a substantial portion of the motivation driving what is thought of as populist politics.

If it is true that our elected officials, and the bureaucracy that administers policy, are tone deaf to the real world experience of the voters, and if officialdom persists in executing policies directed to solve problems that the voters don’t think they have, disillusion will inevitably result.  On both sides.

Officialdom will become cynical as to the apparent surliness of the electorate, and voters will become increasingly cynical about the motives of officialdom.  An opening will exist for the truly cynical populists we see cluttering politics right throughout the western world.

The disconnect is dangerous for the health of democracy.

Today’s New York Times has two columns (one analysis and one opinion) devoted to this issue, so I don’t need to go any further with it.

Except.

For anyone remotely aware of the stranglehold corporate America has on the legislative process via its lobbying efforts none of the above is at all surprising.  As the inestimable work of Gilens and Page  so clearly informs us, corporate America exerts an undue influence in Washington, and one consequence of that influence is the extraordinary bias it gives to the issues deemed important to policymakers.  This is not a question of money in elections, it is more a matter of corporate ability to dictate the legislative agenda subsequent to elections.  The corrosion of officialdom’s ability to understand the needs and/or wants of the electorate is due to the extraordinary capture of the legislative process by a small minority.  Of course policy is ineffective or non-responsive to widely held opinions.  Those opinions are being crowded out.  There is a giant blockage in the workings of our democratic machinery.

Let me leave you with the final paragraph of the Gilens and Page paper I linked to above:

“Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.  Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a wide-spread (if still contested) franchise.  But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”