Martin DyckmanThere are 100 potential questions on the test for immigrants wanting to become naturalized citizens. While reviewing them with a candidate whom I’m coaching, something odd stood out.
He’s expected to know that the United States has a “market” or “capitalist” economy, but not what kind of government we have. He needs to know only how it works — or is supposed to — but not what it is called.
His study guide — not furnished by the government — defines it as a “democratic republic.”
Is that still true?
There is disturbing new evidence that the U.S. is instead an oligarchy, which the dictionary defines as “government by the few…in which a small group exercises control.”
The indictment consists of more than hunches, headlines, campaign finance reports, or anecdotes.
A groundbreaking study published this spring in a journal of the American Political Science Association compared the known public opinions on 1,779 policy issues with how events have played out in Washington.
The findings:
— When the results favor what ordinary citizens want, it’s only because “those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”
— When wealthy people and organized interest groups wish otherwise, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy…When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
The authors, professors Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University, didn’t apply any particular word to the system their statistics describe.
But the only common word that fits is, indeed, oligarchy. An oligarchial republic if you wish, in the sense that a clique rules instead of a king.
“In the United States,” say Gilens and Page, “our findings indicate, the majority does not rule…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.”
We still have the trappings of democracy, such as freedom of speech and regular elections.
But the value of the vote in those elections is being degraded by shrewd and cynical gerrymandering; blatant barriers to voting by the poor, the elderly and minorities; and the billions of special interest dollars that determine not only who wins office — and their conduct in office — but who are able to seek it.
After the elections, the lobbyists take over.
The consequences are obvious and almost beyond counting. Among them: jobs and profits shipped overseas; bankers immune from judgment for the recklessness that cost millions of people their jobs, homes, and life savings; the free world’s most grotesque income equality; arrogant insurance and power companies; a poisoned environment; and the failure to strengthen Social Security by simply raising the income ceiling on the tax that supports it.
The present face of the oligarchy consists primarily of Republicans like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Scott in Florida, the ALEC conspiracy, legislatures that make it diabolically harder to vote, and particularly the cynically unethical John Roberts gang that spawned Citizens United at the Supreme Court. But Democrats have been accomplices also.
For nearly a century, Southern Democrats played the race card to camouflage their obedience to railroad, timber, mining and banking interests.
It was a Democratic congressional campaign chairman who pioneered the exploitation of PACs.
In 1999, a Democratic president collaborated with congressional Republicans to ignore the lessons of the Great Depression and repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which had isolated banking from insurance and stock speculation. Another depression nearly resulted, averted only by a stimulus program for which President Barack Obama deserves universal praise rather than Republican scorn.
It is still possible, on occasion, to defeat the oligarchy. Virginia Republicans caught on that Eric Cantor’s loyalty was not to them but to Wall Street and sent him packing to a cushy retirement there.
Voters everywhere need to do what they did — ask themselves who’s paying for all the propaganda and what they want from it. Consider what candidates have done, not just what they say.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, put it well in a recent speech:
“We are not living in a democracy when 60 percent of Americans are not voting, while billionaires like the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions to buy the United States Senate. That’s called oligarchy, not democracy.”
If there’s any hope for restoring democracy, it’s up to you. It’s to use your vote as if your country’s future depends on it.
Because it does.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
