Why we're losing our democracy

Of Course The U.S. Is An 'Oligarchy' - We Keep Electing The Rich (Click here to read more)

Nick Carnes - April 28, 2014, 12:54 PM EDT
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People who care about American democracy have recently been paying a lot of attention to new research by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which shows that for decades wealthy Americans and business interests have consistently gotten their way in public policy - even when their views conflict with what the vast majority of Americans want. These troubling findings have many observers asking urgent questions: Why do the rich have so much influence in politics? And is there anything we can do about it?
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Many people have pointed the finger at two culprits. They point at the political participation problem that poor and working-class people vote less than wealthier and white-collar Americans. And they point at money in politics, at the billions spent on lobbying and political campaigns.
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Those are important problems, but we also have to remember another big reason why the wealthy have more influence in politics: Wealthy people are the ones in office themselves.
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If millionaires in the United States formed their own political party, that party would make up just 3 percent of the country, but it would have a majority in the House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate, a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans - people with manual-labor and service-industry jobs - were a political party, that party would have made up more than half of the country since the start of the 20th century, but its legislators (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before getting into politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.