THERE CAN BE NO DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA WITHOUT INFORMED, engaged, and active citizenry. Everyone knows this. It’s an eternal construct that runs through the historical and emotional understanding of the United States.1 But what if the citizens are expunged from democracy? What if citizens are told that, on the issues of greatest consequence, their services are no longer required? What if politicians get completely comfortable with the fact that—except perhaps for a few pre-election weeks when it is necessary to suggest differently—they will always defer to concentrated wealth rather than the popular will? What if, when citizens seek to engage, they are overwhelmed by propaganda and victimized by voter suppression? Can what remains be called a democracy? Of course not. Yet, this is the current state of “democracy” in America. This is how it is experienced now by the vast majority of Americans. And this is the essential challenge Americans face as they grapple with the pressing issues posed by technological change, stagnation, and the threat of an increasingly jobless economy.
The United States retains the façade of democracy. It remains a democracy on paper and in our hearts. But ours is, increasingly, a citizenless democracy. In the interregnum between the Progressive Era and the New Deal, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis would write without irony that “the most important political office is that of the private citizen.” Ninety years on, no one who is serious about the American scheme of things today would suggest, except for purposes of comedy, that the private citizen holds any position of importance. Oligarchs and their servants call the shots for the feudal serfs of corporate capital. This would be an unacceptable circumstance at any time in history, but it is an absolutely devastating development in a moment of great economic and social change.
The United States, like many other nations, is at an impasse. A spectacular digital revolution has the capacity to solve the “economic problem,” as defined by Keynes, and to make a revolutionary turn for the better in the human condition. Under the best of circumstances and sufficient democratic participation and leadership, the curse of widespread unemployment and poverty could, like a caterpillar, become the butterfly of a post-scarcity democracy, where no one suffers from economic insecurity and all are able to develop their faculties in a manner historically available only to the privileged. But this very same technological revolution can also generate an opposite outcome. It all comes down to a series of political decisions that people and governments will make regarding how these technologies will be deployed, how the wealth generated by change will be distributed, and what sort of political and economic institutions will prevail in the twenty-first century.
With the exception of questions of war and peace, nowhere are debates about the role of government more vital than when they involve great economic issues. The way in which economic debates are resolved, the way in which economic policy is set, determines the future of the United States and its people. How could it be otherwise? The issues are definitional. The decisions set acceptable levels of employment and unemployment; they influence how and where jobs will be created, and whether those jobs will pay a living wage and provide humane working conditions; they determine how corporations and individuals will be taxed, and at what rate and for what purpose; they establish regulations (or a lack of regulations) for banks and brokers, and for the interactions of those banks and brokers with families and communities; and they make choices about global trade policy that assume virtual constitutional authority, inasmuch as trade agreements can literally trump a nation’s laws. When new issues arise, when new challenges develop, the response of the government locks in approaches and policies—including regulatory frameworks—that decide how the economy will work for decades to come. It is in these debates that the United States decides whether the future belongs to the billionaires or the rest of us. Yet, the rest of us are shunted aside rather than invited to participate.
This aggressive disregard for the people is made possible by a decay of democratic infrastructure that is now so severe that citizens are, for the most part, an afterthought when it comes to decision-making about the economy. This feeds an alienation that is confirmed by appallingly low voter-turnout rates, especially among the young and the poor. People are “voting with their feet,” but they have nowhere to go. In the absence of an engaged citizenry, economic crimes are committed and the criminals are rewarded. Don’t believe us? Let’s return to the scene of the crime of this century: the bailout of the bankers who crashed the global economy in 2008.
TOO IMPORTANT FOR DEMOCRACY
Members of Congress rarely acknowledge that, when it comes to the most important economic choices, power does not rest with them, let alone with the people of the United States. Yet, when Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur appeared in Michael Moore’s 2009 film Capitalism: A Love Story, he asked her, “Do you think it’s too harsh to call what has happened here a coup d’état? A financial coup d’état?”
“I could agree with that,” said Kaptur, one of the longest-serving members of the current Congress, a key player on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and a former domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “I could agree with that. Because the people here really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.”2
Kaptur is right about the influence of economic elites on issues of concern to their bottom lines—an influence that is now so immense that, even when the wealthy cause a crisis, they are rewarded. But what Kaptur says about relatively well-recognized catastrophes such as the Wall Street crash and the economic meltdown that extended from it goes double for catastrophes that are in the making. How can a country that cannot have a reasonable, realistic, and ultimately useful debate when an issue of enormous consequence is staring it in the face—say, for instance, the collapse of the global economy—possibly embark upon the necessary discussion about a digital revolution that may be every bit as disruptive as the industrial revolution? How can a political process that does not dare question the authority of economic elites whose greed and lack of foresight so obviously created a crisis for the great mass of Americans begin to ask the right questions about a jobs crisis that is still in the making? How can citizens challenge a new generation of cyber elites, often working in conjunction with the same old investment bankers and Wall Street charlatans? How do people who are struggling just to get by cut through the spin that claims that the cruelest of cuts must be accepted as the “creative destruction” of a new age? How can America possibly debate the future when so many issues of consequence are taken off the table in the present?
After Wall Street speculators crashed the global economy in 2008, it was obvious that the people were not in charge. Instead of cracking down on the speculators, Congress started writing checks to bail them out. “Think about what these banks have done. They have taken very imprudent behavior, irresponsible. They have really gambled, all right? And in many cases, been involved in fraudulent activity,” Kaptur explained. “And then when they lost, they shifted their losses to the taxpayer.” The big banks are coddled. “Their bed is feathered,” complained Kaptur, who explained that, when it comes to representing the interests of the great mass of citizens who need a strong government to counter the influence of corporate power, “Congress has really shut down.”3
Kaptur’s assessment was correct. She got credit for her frankness. But no real change. What was briefly repaired was broken again by the same powerful interests that did the initial damage. The pulled-punches “reforms” contained in the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation that attempted to impose a mild measure of regulation on big banks were being undone just a few years later; so much so that Republican lawmakers joked openly and unapologetically about the success of their efforts to “undermine aspects of Dodd-Frank.”4 A 2014 Center for Public Integrity study concluded that “less than six years after a massive financial crisis drove the U.S. banking system to the edge of collapse, leading to a $700 billion government bailout and a recession that destroyed as much as $34 trillion in wealth, bankers and lawmakers are working in concert to undermine Dodd-Frank, an 849-page law designed to prevent another failure.”5
Even when the people win, they lose. And, eventually, a lot of the people give up. This explains how, in the parlance of politics, issues can be taken off the table. For the elites to prevail, it is no longer necessary that the people accept all the spin, all the propaganda, all the lies. It is sufficient if citizens are simply overwhelmed by an empty and dispiriting politics that never seems to go right. If nothing that is fixed remains fixed, why bother trying? Why bother voting?
The bank bailout in 2008 provides the most glaring example of how this works, and of how a crisis of economic policy becomes a crisis for democracy. Michael Moore made a movie about it and, to this day, political figures on the left and right grumble about it—including, notably, cynics like former House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, who engineered Republican support for the bailout in 2008 and then decried the deal as his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012. The cynicism is bipartisan. Former President Bill Clinton, who signed legislation that eliminated the Glass-Steagall barrier against risky banking practices (and who journalist Robert Scheer aptly observed “bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression”6) had the nerve to deliver a 2012 Democratic National Convention address in which he complained about politicians who “want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts.”7
There’s a reason why Ron Suskind titled his book on the Wall Street bailout and its aftermath Confidence Men. The classic definition of a “confidence man” points to a scam artist who wins the trust of people by feigning care and concern. Then, when the victims let their guard down, placing their faith in the confidence man to do right by them, the defrauding begins. Suskind revealed the hidden history of Wall Street and the White House in the months and years following the 2008 meltdown, and how political and economic elites “manufactured” confidence when they should have been taking necessary steps to eliminate the threat posed by “too-big-to-fail” banks and the pathologies that extend from them.8 But the “confidence man” analogy goes for economic debates in general. We are told to relax because the smartest men in the room have this covered. In fact, what they are covering are their own backsides and their own greed. The more complex an issue becomes—and the more money that is at stake—the more the confidence men seek to take that issue off the table. “If ‘Too Big to Fail’ and ‘Too Connected to Fail’ have become the slogans justifying the repeated government bailouts of some major banks and insurers such as A.I.G., these firms’ continued resistance to tighter government restrictions might be summed up as ‘Too Complex to Regulate,’” observed Andrea Orr of the Economic Policy Institute.9
“THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED”
The same argument is peddled when tax policy is debated. Americans are told that tax cuts for the wealthy and for multinational corporations must simply be accepted on faith as the necessary cost of doing business in modern times. The argument has gone so well that, since Dwight Eisenhower was president, the top federal income tax rate has collapsed from 91 percent to 70 percent to 50 percent to 39.6 percent under a Democratic president who is decried by his right-wing critics as a socialist.10 The rate decline does not begin to tell the story of the extent to which corporations and billionaires have restructured the tax code to avoid paying their fair share—and to literally redistribute wealth upward. “[Every] few months there’s a new report on big corporations working the system,” says Senator Elizabeth Warren. “One recent report showed that, of the big corporations in the S&P 500, 115 paid less than 20% in taxes. Another report claimed that, of 280 of the biggest corporations in the country, 78 paid nothing in taxes during one of the last three years.”11 Billionaire Warren Buffett reminds us that, thanks to loopholes that let investors like him avoid taxes, his rate is lower than that of his secretary. Indeed, says Buffett, he’s often “the lowest-paying taxpayer in the office.”12
For much of the twentieth century, this state of affairs would have been unthinkable. Progressive income taxation—in which the richest Americans pay at a higher marginal rate than those with lower incomes—was accepted as good for the economy and good for democracy. Everyone knew that progressive taxation enhanced equality, and that it communicated to rich and poor alike that Americans were “all in this together.” Progressive tax policy was part of the democratic infrastructure.
But no longer. Americans have been told for decades now that they must accept supply-side strategies that are so convoluted in their construction, and so obviously flawed in their execution, that former President George Herbert Walker Bush—no liberal he—famously referred to them as “voodoo economics.” Anyone who pays attention to the data knows that, as Rick Unger of Forbes has explained, while taxcut proposals “can save the wealthy a healthy chunk of money” they “are highly unlikely to do much of anything for our economy.” Writing for one of the most pro-business publications in America, Unger argues that, “we have an obligation to consider the benefits of a tax cut versus the long-term damage to the country.”13
Yet, when it comes to tax debates, virtually all Republicans and most Democrats refuse to adopt even this simple standard of fiscal and social responsibility. In so doing, they shut down serious discussion about how tax policy shapes our economic reality, and about how tax policy could be used not merely to fund government but to address issues that Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, agree are challenging the stability of society. Income inequality is now broadly accepted as a serious issue in the United States. No surprise there, as the gap not just between the rich and poor but between the exceptionally rich and everyone else is widening at an exponential rate.
University of California-Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez determined that the top 1 percent of Americans captured 91 percent of all income gains from 2009 to 2012, the initial years of recovery from the Great Recession. Saez based his research on pretax, pre-government-benefit income, explaining, “That’s the key stat to think about how the market allocates incomes in the first place. Anybody should be worried that the recovery from the Great Recession has been so skewed in terms of market incomes.”14 Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, did additional research on the later years of the recovery and determined that “so far all of the gains of the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent.”15 All of the gains.**
Economic Policy Institute research on tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy indicates that they have played an outsized role in expanding income inequality, such that “roughly 30 percent of the rise in post-tax, post-transfer inequality is attributable to erosions in the redistributive nature of tax and budget policy.” Yet, while “tax policy [provides] one of the more concrete policy levers affecting inequality,” the lever is not used. In fact, it is frequently pushed in the wrong direction.
Consider this: the billionaire-funded front groups that for years have tried to generate support for balancing budgets with “entitlement reform” invariably propose to “Fix the Debt” with an egalitarian sounding abstraction they call “shared sacrifice.” There’s always plenty of sacrifice on the part of poor and the elderly. But the share that the billionaires and corporate CEOs get to keep invariably ends up as . . . more. A 2013 study of the inner workings of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s “long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy” found that many of the CEOs who had signed on to letters calling for austerity “head firms that pay a negative tax rate, like Honeywell, GE, Boeing and Verizon. And as the Public Accountability Initiative notes, many lobby to preserve costly tax breaks for the wealthy (including the ‘carried interest’ tax loophole that made Peterson a rich man) and to prevent a tax on Wall Street speculation.”16
“Fix the Debt” firms are even pushing for a “territorial tax system” that will increase the debt by $1 trillion over ten years and encourage the offshoring of American jobs. Why would supposed debt slayers favor this boondoggle? Because, the Institute for Policy Studies calculates, at least sixty-three “Fix-the-Debt firms would divvy up a $134 billion windfall.”17 No way that proposal would get traction, right? Wrong. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who formerly chaired that powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has long been a staunch supporter of the “territorial tax” scheme, which would let US-based multinational corporations avoid paying taxes on dividends they receive from foreign affiliates—a huge tax break for corporations and an invitation to offshore operations. No surprise there. Ryan is always pitching proposals to balance budgets on the backs of working people (Medicaid vouchers, raising the retirement age, gambling Social Security money on Wall Street) while opposing tax hikes for wealthy campaign donors and corporations.18
What was surprising was the 2013 Reuters report headlined: “Obama might back territorial tax system: business chief.”19 The president had just been reelected after he ripped Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Ryan—the party’s vice-presidential standard bearer—for proposing tax breaks for billionaires and corporations that would not “invest in our children’s education or rebuild our roads or put more folks back to work.”20 Now a White House official was telling Reuters that, while the president was not up for “a pure territorial system” he was “eager to ‘pursue corporate tax reform that lowers the rate.’”21 Obama’s impure compromise of 2015 was to tax the offshore profits of corporations at a rate of 14 percent—as opposed to the statutory federal income tax rate of 35 percent. Citizens for Tax Justice, the watchdog and advocacy group responsible for groundbreaking reports of corporate tax evasion, examined the Obama plan and concluded that “it’s hard to see why his approach makes sense. The companies currently holding profits in foreign tax havens accumulated these profits over a period when the statutory federal income tax rate stood at its current 35 percent. These companies shifted some of their profits offshore to avoid paying the statutory rate on their U.S. profits, and they should not receive a reward for dodging their tax bills in the form of a substantially lower tax rate.”22
Yes, it is hard to see how this approach makes much sense, unless of course tax proposals that ask wealthy individuals and corporations to pay their fair share are off the table. And, for the most part, they are. Not officially off the table, mind you. President Obama and others still float tax-the-rich proposals, and they can even get a bit of traction. But the option of seriously taxing the rich, as happened in the days of radicals like Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, is so far off the table that it is ridiculed. The Washington groupthink is as ubiquitous as it is favorable to the elites. In 2015, when Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky introduced a modest proposal to close corporate loopholes, with an eye toward raising needed revenues and removing incentives to move jobs overseas, Forbes explained that the proposal was “swimming against the tide of conventional thinking” because so many “policymakers today take it for granted that foreign investment must be subsidized through the tax code.”23
Not popular wisdom, mind you. Polls routinely show that there is overwhelming support for taxing billionaires and banks at substantially higher rates. A February 2015 AP survey found that “68 percent of those questioned said wealthy households pay too little in federal taxes; only 11 percent said the wealthy pay too much.” Fifty-six percent of those surveyed favored substantial new taxes on the immense capital gains of the rich (including 46 percent of Republicans) while just 16 percent were opposed. New taxes on banks were winning by a margin of almost four to one. The people weren’t signaling a desire for minor tinkering with the tax code, observed the AP analysis. “The findings echo the populist messages of two liberal senators—Warren of Massachusetts and Sanders of Vermont.”24 In other words, when it comes to tax policy, the popular will is with one senator who says “the system is rigged”25 and another who complains that the United States is becoming “a plutocracy . . . of the rich, for the rich and by the rich.”26
But popular will does not steer the debate, or the policymaking, in Washington or most state capitals these days. If it did, the government would not merely be taxing corporations and the rich. It would be creating millions of jobs right now, urgently studying the changes and challenges posed by automation and anticipating the threat of an increasingly jobless economy. Unfortunately, for all the talk among politicians and pundits about their reverence for “job creators”—the current term of art for tax-dodging corporations and billionaires—job creation is also off the table. Way off.
FORGETTING FULL EMPLOYMENT
When the Great Recession was at its worst, in the fall of 2009, unemployment “peaked” at 10 percent. The United Nations reported that the United States and other developed countries were experiencing “a jobs crisis” with “sustained and devastating impacts on individuals, families, households and their communities.” Job losses, the UN explained, had “pushed countless families into financial and economic hardship, resulting in the loss of homes to foreclosure and increases in poverty, debt and bankruptcy, especially in the United States and other advanced economies.”27 A US News and World Report headline asked “Is Unemployment the Worst since the Great Depression?”28 (Answer: Not quite, but “it won’t take much to get it to the worst since the Great Depression.”) CNN’s Lou Dobbs spoke of an “unemployment nightmare.” The New York Times’s Bob Herbert declared, “We’re hurtin’ and there ain’t much healin’ on the horizon.”29
Unfortunately, the misery has not ended, even if the news media coverage of it has. The official unemployment rate did begin to decrease after hitting its peak in the fall of 2009. Five years later, it finally fell below 6 percent, and it continued to creep down to 5.5 percent in mid-2015.30 As we note in Chapter 2, the “official” unemployment rate is only one of the many strands of data about unemployment produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While there is an “official” unemployment rate identified as the “U-3” figure that is reported each month as the measure of what percentage of folks have jobs and what percentage do not, there is also an “unofficial” rate, the “U-6” figure, that more precisely measures the number of Americans who are not just unemployed but also those who have given up actively looking for work and those so “underemployed” that are unlikely to be able to support themselves or their families.31 Forbes says, and we agree, that the “unofficial” U-6 number is “a better (though still flawed) indicator of labor market conditions.” While the U-3 number is unreasonably optimistic, the U-6 number is realistic.
The two numbers are very different. For instance, while the “official” unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in March 2015, when there was much celebration about the recovery from the Great Recession, the “unofficial” rate was 10.9 percent. That’s right, almost six years after the official unemployment rate “peaked” in 2009, the realistic unemployment rate in 2015 was still at a level that 2009 reports characterized as a “nightmare.” For many Americans this is indeed a living nightmare of epic proportions. The pioneering analysts of modern American inequality Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel long ago argued that there is “economic apartheid in America,” producing powerful evidence of connections between racial disparity and economic inequality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the jobless data of not just the recent past but right now.32 The Atlantic reminds us that “the unemployment rate for blacks has always been at least 60 percent higher than for whites.”33 Among young African American men today, joblessness is five times higher than for white Americans.34 In deindustrialized urban communities, the number of people who are out of work is generally high, but for the young people of color, unemployment rates as high as 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent are startlingly common.35
Put another way: for millions of Americans, it is always a “worst since the Great Depression” moment. And in many regions their number is growing, as college graduates who thought their professional degrees would be tickets to the middle class find themselves competing for disappearing jobs with their parents.36 What makes things even worse is that there is no Great Depression, nor even Great Recession, urgency on the part of the political class regarding joblessness in America. Instead of recognizing the need for action and intervention, there is celebration that things are “headed in the right direction”—along with a constant redefinition of the right direction. Unemployment rates that just a few decades ago were broadly seen as unreasonable are now accepted as “the new normal.”
In the summer of 2012, as Democrats were renominating Barack Obama at a convention where speakers heralded the president’s “new American Dream economy,” the official unemployment rate was 8 percent and the actual rate was 14.7 percent.37 Those numbers were higher than in 1984, when that year’s Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, decried high unemployment and the hopelessness of a nation where “the help-wanted ads are full of listings for executives, and for dishwashers—but not much in between.”38 Of course, politicians adjust their rhetoric based on their status as incumbents or challengers. But should we really accept that numbers that thirty years ago meant “working Americans are worse off, and the middle class is standing on a trap door” are now economically and politically acceptable?39 If we do, then we should also accept that the goalposts aren’t being moved, they are being taken down. After the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in early 2015 that 295,000 Americans had filed for unemployment benefits, former White House counselor Bill Curry noted, “Economists called it good news, as the number was less than 300,000; that’s the line they say separates good news from bad. But it isn’t much less. . . . Job growth is anemic. Still, economists say things are going so well we can raise interest rates. They call that good news—though they don’t say for whom.”40
This is a relatively new development that speaks volumes about the disconnect between politics and people, and that provides a jarring reminder of how much effort it will take to get official Washington focused on debates about automation and the displacement of workers in a “new economy.” Coming out of the Great Depression in the 1930s it was understood for a good two generations that pursuing policies to achieve full employment was a crucial issue for the government, perhaps second in importance only to national defense. After witnessing the rise of fascism in nations with catastrophic levels of joblessness, full employment was understood as necessary for both economic and political stability. It was a core component of the democratic infrastructure.
In the 1970s, when a spike in unemployment and inflation numbers stirred concerns about a possible recession—yes, there was a time in America when officials anticipated rather than merely responded to economic challenges—Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey and California Congressman Augustus Hawkins pushed for what came to be known as the “Humphrey-Hawkins Full-Employment Act.” The measure proposed that the government establish standards for acceptable unemployment rates: not more than 3 percent for persons aged 20 or over and not more than 4 percent for persons aged 16 or over.41 More important, Humphrey and Hawkins proposed that, if the private sector appeared to be falling short of those goals, the government would create a “reservoir of public employment.” This was a Keynesian response, and it had a lot of popular appeal. The Humphrey-Hawkins proposal was embraced by Democratic presidential contenders, endorsed by newspaper editorial pages, and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter as the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978. To this day, Duke University public policy professor William Darity Jr. reminds us, “The law charges the public sector with the responsibility of direct job creation.”42 Unfortunately, the charge has not been kept. What were originally proposed as standards were reimagined as “goals.” Triggers for New Deal–style interventions were replaced with requirements for annual reports by the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The dream that serious economic planning and stability might replace chance and misery was dashed by a Democratic president and Congress in 1978 and abandoned altogether in the realigned America of Ronald Reagan. The year 1983, when full employment was supposed to be achieved under the law, began with a national unemployment rate of 10.4 percent; states such as Michigan and West Virginia had jobless rates over 15 percent; and 21.2 percent of African Americans were out of work.
Reagan refused to take meaningful action to address unemployment, and he refused even to consider creating a “reservoir of public employment.” Reagan peddled an anti-Keynesian fantasy that said the worst possible approach to unemployment was for the government to start creating jobs. And this fantasy has held ever since. Democratic presidents may support some stimulus spending in hard times—especially if it is linked to tax breaks, as was Barack Obama’s 2009 plan—while Republicans just want the tax breaks.
There are still a few outliers like Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr., who in 2013 rejected the happy talk of recovery from the Great Recession and instead proposed what he called the “Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act.” Though the bill title was nostalgic, the senior member of the House was recognizing contemporary challenges and anticipating jobless economics: “Since 2000 more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. have closed and roughly 50,000 industrial jobs have been lost each month,” he explained, adding that
now service sector jobs, where the remaining two-thirds of all workers are currently employed, are disappearing. Because of, but not limited to technology advances, these middle-income jobs are not likely to come back, effectively hollowing out . . . America’s middle class and leaving millions of unemployed and underemployed workers with limited future prospects. The effect of these trends on American jobs were significantly aggravated by the “Great Recession.”43
“During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s New Deal put millions of Americans back to work building roads, dams, bridges, parks and electrification systems,” Conyers concluded. “There is no reason why America cannot have a 21st century ‘New Deal,’ where unemployed Americans can be gainfully employed rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and strengthening our communities.”44 Actually, there is a reason. Unlike in the period from the 1930s through the 1970s, when presidents and Congresses and the media were prepared to engage in serious debates about joblessness and government intervention to achieve full employment, the initiative by Conyers has gone absolutely nowhere. Even on the cusp of a Great Recession, even under a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate and for a time with a Democratic House, full employment was off the table. Just where Ronald Reagan wanted it. And it is a non-story in the news media.
Reagan’s great contribution—if it can be called that—to debates about jobs and economic policy in the United States was to convince most of the political class, virtually all of the media, and a substantial portion of the American people that Keynes and FDR were wrong about the role government could play in addressing the loss of jobs, income, and opportunity. As we’ve noted, Reagan began his presidency by declaring, on the cusp of a scorching recession, that “in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Reagan turned the United States hard against industrial policy and investment in job creation, and harder still toward a policy of deferring to corporations with regard to essential issues such as domestic investment and global trade. It was a disastrous turn, as an irony of history illustrates. In early 1983, when unemployment in America was near its peak, Reagan told the country that everything was going to be fine because he has just visited a Chrysler plant in Fenton, Missouri, “where 1,700 workers are being called back to a newly modernized plant.”45
There were two Chrysler plants in Fenton. But no more. When the Great Recession hit, Chrysler slid into bankruptcy. It got a huge government bailout, which supposedly “saved the auto industry.” But, under the North American Free Trade Agreement, production was moved from one plant to Canada and from the other to Mexico. As the second plant was shuttered in Fenton in 2009, thousands of United Auto Workers union members rallied outside it. The local UAW president told the crowd, “This is no longer a business issue, but a social issue. The corporations failed and they had to borrow from the U.S. taxpayers. Now they want to carry U.S. taxpayers’ money across the borders.”46
Which brings us to trade policy—the economic issue that presidents since Reagan have worked hardest to keep off the table.
TRADE DEALS: “WHERE THE REAL KNIFE WAS PUT IN THE FLESH”
For Americans who seek the debate that must be had about the intersection of technology and society—and about the damage that is done when political and economic and media elites take issues off the table—Kaptur has some counsel: consider how this country handles trade policy. This, she says, is “where the real knife was put in the flesh.”47
As with debates about technological change and the dislocation that extends from it, debates about trade policy are portrayed as complicated—too complicated for citizens and even for members of Congress to understand. As with debates about technological change, debates about trade policy are portrayed as delicate—too delicate to be trusted to popular opinion or popular intervention. As with debates about technological change, debates about trade policy are portrayed as essential—too essential to question the deals that are done or the deals that will be done. Those who raise concerns about the economic and social disruption that results from flawed trade policies are constantly portrayed as ill-informed or simply emotional about change that is inevitable. Critics of specific free-trade agreements and the broader model of international arrangement on which they are constructed find themselves dismissed by the likes of Anne O. Krueger, a top International Monetary Fund official, as having just two motivations: “One was fear; the other a desire to protect vested interests.”48
Media outlets amplify this jingoism, rarely asking if there might be reason to fear, never considering that the “vested interests” are working families and the planet.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page preaches the free-trade gospel with abandon, griping about how “on the right and the left you get critics who are protectionist,” while the New York Times features cheerleading headlines about “Globalization that Works for Workers at Home.”49 And political leaders of both parties declare that, even if past trade deals have never turned out as well as promised, opposition is pointless—and dangerous. Yes, President Obama acknowledged in a 2014 speech, there may be “pushback” against new trade deals, opposition based on “a public perception generally that trade has resulted in an erosion of our manufacturing base as companies moved overseas in search of lower-wage labor.” Yes, Obama acknowledged that the perception might even have basis in fact—but he explained: “That horse is out of the barn [since] much of that shift in search of low-wage labor has already occurred.”50
The message, delivered from every direction, is “shut up and give up.”
One of the mistakes that is made in analyzing the failed politics of our times is to look for a “vast right-wing conspiracy” or the machination of a “hidden hand.” In fact, economic and political elites are often quite open about their goals. Noam Chomsky suggested a quarter century ago that the great question is the obvious one: “whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided.”51 Without saying so in precise terms, CEOs and newspaper editors and presidents tell us that, when an issue is really important, democracy and freedom are, indeed, threats to be avoided. It is, Americans are constantly reminded, better to let the technocrats, the self-interested and permanently engaged lobbyists, handle the complicated issues. Don’t trust your own experience of shuttered factories and broken unions, let the experts who got us this far lead us deeper into the abyss. This goes double when debates involve future arrangements, on issues such as trade policy and automation. One of the reasons why the political discourse in the United States seems to whipsaw from crisis to crisis is that technocrats and the CEOs they work for are not inclined to put issues on the table when citizens could still have a role in developing policies. Best to tell the people after the fact that everything has been settled and that their prospects for repairing the damage done are slim because that horse is out of the barn.
As America approaches what must be a great debate about the changes that a digital age will usher in; as we consider the implications of technological changes that will eliminate millions of jobs, de-skill many of the jobs that remain, and create only a handful of new positions for digital managers and robot repairwomen; and as we look for ways in which to share rather than concentrate the wealth yielded by reducing workforces, it is vital to understand that the United States has been here before—frequently. And that the United States has messed up—badly. The problem was not that the people were too “protectionist,” too fearful, too confused to make the right demands. The problem was that the people were aggressively discouraged from making demands that were every bit as appropriate, and far more necessary for society, than the demands of the CEOs and the bankers.
For more than thirty years, under Democratic and Republican presidents, with the approval of Congresses controlled by both parties, the United States has embraced trade and investment policies that the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations argues “have reflected the influence of powerful corporate interests. They protect what’s important to corporate America but do little or nothing to safeguard the rights of workers and the environment here and around the world. They fuel a race to the bottom in living standards.”52
That race to the bottom has been measured, charted, detailed, and revealed. The data is devastating. Since Congress approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico in 1993, after a push by Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, presidents and “opposition” leaders have in remarkably bipartisan fashion adopted a long list of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and related deals. Each of these FTAs has made it easier for multinational corporations to move jobs to countries with lower wages, fewer union protections, weaker environmental regulations, and lousier records of defending human rights. The result has been a hollowing out of American manufacturing that is well recognized in the communities that are on the frontlines of the deindustrialization of the United States. In 2001, shortly after a Republican-controlled Congress worked with President Clinton to provide China with most-favored-nation trading status, there were 398,887 private manufacturing facilities in the United States. A decade later, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the number had fallen to 342,647—a loss of 56,190 factories.53
It gets worse. According to a 2015 study by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, “the aggregate U.S. goods trade deficit with Free Trade Agreement (FTA) partners is more than five times as high as before the deals went into effect, while the aggregate trade deficit with non-FTA countries has actually fallen.”54 Trade deals as they are now done do not benefit the US economy, they benefit multinational corporations. Indeed, says US Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, “our trade deals amount to corporate handouts and worker sellouts.”55
The biggest sellout is of democracy itself. Trade agreements in recent decades have established so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. When a trade agreement that includes such a mechanism—as, for instance, did NAFTA—is approved by the Congress and signed by the president, multinational corporations are afforded a new avenue for challenging government laws and regulations in the United States. And the avenue is a friendly one for the corporations: an international tribunal, or “court,” that has the authority to impose penalties on nations that pass laws that the tribunal determines to have erected a barrier to a foreign corporation maximizing profits. The penalties put actual economic pressure on nations to back away from taking steps to protect workers, farmers, consumers, and the environment. “Investor-state challenges were rare before the new millennium, but have become increasingly popular tools for corporations to use when challenging regulations they object to,” explains Zach Carter, a former member of the steering committee of Americans for Financial Reform who writes about the impact of trade policy on domestic regulations. “Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, companies including Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical and Eli Lilly have attempted to overrule Canadian regulations on offshore oil drilling, fracking, pesticides, drug patents and other issues.”56
This is an extreme example of how issues are taken off the table—and of how popular movements that beat corporations in domestic-policy debates can still be thwarted. But it is increasingly popular in an age of globalization and ever-expanding corporate reach. That reach concerns progressive populists and honest conservatives. “[Under] ISDS, U.S. investors abroad and foreign investors in the United States can collect damages from the treasuries of their host governments by virtue of the judgments of arbitration panels that are entirely outside of the legal structure of the respective countries,” observes Daniel Ikenson, the director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. “This all raises serious questions about democratic accountability, sovereignty, checks and balances, and the separation of power.”57
When progressive reformers from Americans for Financial Reform and Cato Institute libertarians are in agreement, that ought to put issues on the table. In a functional democracy, where political parties compete on the basis of ideas and issues, revelations about “secret tribunals” with the power to impose fines on Americans for passing laws would be a call to the barricades. Yet, after the 2014 elections shifted control of the US Senate to Republicans who had spent the previous six years seeking to derail Barack Obama’s presidency, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell embraced Obama’s request for “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Authority to allow the president to negotiate a sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal without consulting Congress. Even as he admitted that “it’s an enormous grant of power, obviously, from a Republican Congress to a Democratic president,” McConnell said he was comfortable letting Obama do the deal without the procedural hurdles. Why? The Republican leader explained that “what the American people are saying is they want us to look for areas of agreement, and this certainly is one of them.”58
No, they’re not.
In 2014 Hart Research Associates and Chesapeake Beach Consulting polled Americans on the question of whether Congress should grant “Fast Track” authority to the president. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they were opposed, while only 28 percent expressed support—and only 12 percent were firmly in favor of the idea. “Demographically, opposition is very broad, with no more than one-third of voters in any region of the country or in any age cohort favoring fast track,” reported the pollsters. Then they did something fascinating. Recognizing that Americans get limited information about trade debates, the pollsters set out “to simulate a public debate over the merits of fast track and the proposed TPP trade deal, by presenting each respondent with an equal number of arguments made by organizations supporting and opposing fast track.” With more information, overall opposition rose to 65 percent.59
McConnell was entirely wrong about the will of the people, a fact that could not have escaped the wily career politician. But the senator had a clear sense of his political responsibility in a country where men like McConnell understand the “democratic infrastructure” as a network of campaign donors and lobbyists. The top donors to McConnell’s 2014 reelection bid were individuals and political action committees associated with the “Securities and Investment” industries—ardent supporters of free trade.60 McConnell was also clear that he would not be called out for rejecting the popular will. In an age of steadily stenographic media coverage of economic debates, there is little or no accountability on complex issues for politicians such as Mitch McConnell—or Barack Obama.
When Obama was bidding for the Democratic presidency nomination in 2008, he defined himself as a candidate of “hope and change” in a number of ways. He thrilled labor audiences in primary states such as Wisconsin by denouncing policies that had saddled the United States with NAFTA, the permanent normalization of trade with China, and yawning trade deficits. Obama promised to scrap the secretive, “backroom-deal” negotiating style of “Fast Track” agreements that elbowed the Congress and the American people out of the process. He talked about renegotiating NAFTA to add safeguards for the environment and labor rights. If Canada and other trading partners rejected changes, Obama said he was open to exiting the agreements altogether. It seemed as if a new day was dawning when it came to the trade policy—or, at the very least, in the approach of a too-frequently-compromised Democratic Party.61
Then came reports that Obama’s senior economic adviser, Austin Goolsbee, had quietly assured the Canadians that the candidate’s statements were not to be believed—that his populist appeals in working-class towns battered by trade-related layoffs and factory closings “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”62 When the news broke, before the critical Ohio primary, Obama aides pointed political journalists toward reports that his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, had apparently had aides provide similar “not to worry” assurances to the Canadians. Reporters who had never bothered to connect the dots between trade policies, shuttered factories, and the righteous indignation of Ohio workers were lapping up the “he-said, she-said” scrap.63 The controversy grew so intense that Obama had to address it. He told a Cleveland TV station: “I think it’s important for viewers to understand that [the claim that he was saying one thing to workers and another thing to Wall Street elites and foreign governments] was not true.”64
Obama lost Ohio, but he won enough other states to secure the nomination. Then, within days of assembling the delegates he needed, Fortune magazine featured an interview with the candidate headlined “Obama: NAFTA Not So Bad after All.”65 Reminded that during the primary season he had referred to NAFTA as “devastating” and suggested he might use an opt-out clause in the trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Obama replied, “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.”
“Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” Obama continued. Abandoning the tough talk of just a few months earlier, Obama sounded an awful lot like the free-trader the Canadians had been assured he would be. All that primary-season rhetoric about fighting to protect workers, was just, Obama said, another way of “opening up a dialogue.” Fortune was satisfied. “The general campaign is on, independent voters up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric—at least when it comes to free trade.” Yes, of course, the business magazine observed, NAFTA would remain “the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.” But the CEOs and the bankers could rest assured, Fortune chirped, for “the presumptive Democratic nominee suggests he doesn’t want to unilaterally blow up NAFTA after all.”66
Journalist and commentator David Sirota summed the whole charade up when he explained, “Here you have a policy—NAFTA—that is among the most unpopular policies of the last generation, according to polls. Here you have a candidate who campaigned against it in the primary. And within weeks of getting the general election, here you have that same candidate running to Corporate America’s magazine of record to reassure Wall Street about that same policy.”67 President Obama did more than that. Despite opposition from the workers and environmentalists and human rights activists he promised to represent, he signed sweeping free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.68 And in his 2015 State of the Union Address the president announced that he wanted to work with McConnell and the Republicans to enact the biggest trade agreements since NAFTA: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Asian countries and a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe.
Members of Obama’s own party, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, raised objections. But the president was having none of it. He ripped on his fellow Democrats and labor unions that raised entirely legitimate democracy concerns about specific threats to financial regulations—saying they “don’t know what they’re talking about.” The president actually compared his own party’s progressives to the conspiracy theorists on the right. Recalling that Tea Party activists had tried to derail healthcare reform with claims that “ObamaCare” would create “death panels,” the president said, “Someone coming up with a slogan like ‘death panels’ doesn’t mean it’s true. The same thing is true on this.”69
Why is President Obama using all of his political capital, and then some, to advance an issue embraced by his ostensible political opponents and detested by most of the Americans who voted him into office twice? The answer has everything to do with the reshaping of American politics so that, when citizens try to cut through the spin, when they get engaged and decide to put an issue on the table, they find themselves pushing against stenographic media, big-money politics, and the structural barriers to democracy itself. Welcome to citizenless democracy.
OUR SHRIVELED POLITICAL CULTURE
Nothing says “shut up and give up” quite so effectively as a candidate who tells the people that he will champion their interests on a complex issue that matters greatly to them and then, upon his nomination and election, signals that he cannot possibly deliver on the promise. It bakes in cynicism about politics and about what is possible in a democracy—signaling that the fundamental issues really are off the table. This is the means by which unelected bankers and billionaires most effectively and steadily define the popular discourse, placing issues of concern to their bottom lines out of reach for the great mass of citizens. Then, the elites need only convince a handful of policymakers who are, for reasons of campaign finance, eternally beholden to them. The bigger the issue, invariably, the more “off-limits” it is. In this calculus, politics becomes boring, as it does not discuss that which matters most. Voters check out from the electoral process, and citizens question the value of organizing around issues. This is fine by the elites, and by the political mandarins who implement their agenda. It is devastating for democracy.
The news media plays a crucial role in keeping democracy citizenless, as the examples we have focused on illustrate. Mainstream journalism, even at its best, generally takes its cues for what the range of legitimate debate is on an issue by what political and economic elites say about the issue. That is considered “professional” and “nonpartisan.” If elites are all in concert on an issue—as with ending progressive taxation, abandoning full employment as a serious policy objective, or fast-tracking secretive trade deals—the news media rarely provides much if any critical analysis. That would be “unprofessional” and “ideological.” In the current crisis that is decimating the commercial model for journalism, the amount of resources for actual hard-digging into the actual planning and ambitions of the powerful is generally non-existent, and not something corporate owners have shown much inclination to encourage.
As for political journalism, with a few fine exceptions, it is mostly pointless gossip and nutritionless assessments of spin and polls. With regard to political campaigns the journalism hits rock bottom. Rather than note that the emperor is wearing no clothes, or that the complete corruption of the electoral process by what former US Senator Russ Feingold describes as “legalized bribery”70 makes a mockery of self-government, the news media plays along with the fiction that the elections accurately represent the will of the people, and that elected “representatives” will represent the interests of the voters. That hardly anyone votes by global democratic standards is almost never mentioned, as this would call into question the general hype about democracy-in-action proffered otherwise, and it would force TV pundits in particular to confront directly the asininity of political advertising, the campaign lingua franca of these times. It would also require a persistent and unyielding exposure of the influence of billionaires over the election process.71
Each new election cycle consolidates the power of those who would manipulate not just the politics of the country but a crony capitalist enterprise so rewarding that tiny “investments” of campaign contributions yield “returns” now measured in billions. Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson gave roughly $200 million to various and sundry conservative causes and candidates in 2012.72 By 2014 his wealth had risen to $40 billion—helped along, the smart betting suggests, by the relaxed approach of federal, state, and local regulators and investigators to complaints about unsavory business practices.73 It is true that $200 million sounds like a lot of money, but Adelson is so rich that he could spend $200 million every week for three straight years and still be a billionaire. He can find that cash in his spare-change jar. But that misses the point: buying politicians is not a high-end consumer good for Adelson, or the other billionaires and corporations that bankroll American politics today. It is an investment. What does Adelson get for his $200 million? A smooth ride to the top. According to Forbes, “Adelson added more to his fortune than any other person (in the world)” in 2013 and his ranking on the magazine’s 2014 list of the billionaires moved to No. 8.74 That placed him a rung or so below brothers Charles and David Koch, whose “donor network” steered at least $400 million into the 2012 campaign cycle and then came back with plans for a “$300 Million Spending Spree” in the non-presidential campaign season of 2014.75 But Adelson was a rung or so above members of the Walton family, who have for years used their Walmart largesse to slather candidates who are ready to attack public education with campaign cash and structural support.76
So much money flows into campaigns, and the lobbying that polices the governments that extend from those campaigns, that each new election cycle sets new records for campaign fund-raising and expenditures—with total spending for the federal, state, local, judicial, and referendum races of 2012 surpassing $10 billion.77 The records are barely noted as they are surpassed so quickly and so steadily. What is noted, albeit briefly, are the announcements that point to the next plateau. When it was revealed that the network of billionaires established by the Koch brothers to advance their business agenda planned to spend almost $900 million to influence the politics of 2016, it was news—for a day. But instead of raging against the acquisition of government by non-state players with little or no interest in the common good—as the crusader editors of old did—the news of the latest Koch initiative on behalf of favored Republicans inspired today’s major media outlets to fevered speculation about whether and how Democratic donors might match the spending.78
The deplorable state of American governance is not an accident. Those economic elites and their mandarins are, in fact, endeavoring on a regular basis to make American democracy less functional and less real. Their most overt machinations are evident to engaged citizens and members of Congress, who raise an appropriate outcry when the activist majority on the US Supreme Court hands down a particularly egregious decision to flood more money into politics, as was the case with the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and 2014 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission rulings, or when a similar majority invalidates key sections of the Voting Rights Act, as was the case with their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling. The 2014 headline on an analysis for the Reuters news service by Constitutional Accountability Center chief counsel Elizabeth B. Wydra got it right: the mantra of the court majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts has become “Easier to Donate, Harder to Vote.”79
America’s two major political parties differ rhetorically on plenty of issues, and they are each quick to accuse the other of every manner of atrociousness. Yet the Republicans and Democrats are remarkably collaborative when it comes to gaming the system. “Our giving is very equal between parties across the country,” Walmart’s Brooke Buchanan says of corporate political action committee donations that in 2012 split 51 percent Republican and 49 percent Democratic—and who prove the maxim “the rich get richer” no matter which party is in power.80 There really are populist Democrats such as Sanders and Warren who want to tax the rich and bust the banks, just as there really are Republicans such as Congressmen Justin Amash and Walter Jones Jr. who want to do something about crony capitalism—especially as it sustains a military-industrial complex that benefits (and benefits from) both parties.81 But in an age that supposedly prizes “disruption,” the real disrupters are often treated as political pariahs.
The Democratic Party’s impulse toward progressive populism appears to be stronger and more broadly based than the Republican opposition to crony capitalism. Yet, despite what Rush Limbaugh says, the Democratic Party is not exactly threatening Wall Street. Democratic presidents are managerial as opposed to radical, as are most Democrats in Congress. After the party suffered a severe setback in the 2014 midterm elections, author William Greider noted that “instead of addressing [the reality of economic misery and uncertainty in an agonizingly slow recovery] and proposing remedies, the Democrats ran on a cowardly, uninspiring platform: the Republicans are worse than we are. Undoubtedly, that’s true—but so what?” President Obama and his party, said Greider, “have no credible solutions to offer. To get serious about inequality and the deteriorating middle class, Democrats would have to undo a lot of the damage their own party has done to the economy over the past thirty years.”82
Like the Republicans, the Democrats want to chalk up political wins and to enjoy the power associated with those wins. As such, the party is more than willing to compromise not just policies but principles if there are funds to be raised or strategies to be implemented. So Democrats think, and act, a lot like Republicans when it comes to maintaining the infrastructure of democracy, which is to say they are not all that interested in the work. When Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and the RNC restructured their 2016 nominating process in a way that made it less friendly to voters and more friendly to campaign donors—by cutting the number of debates and collapsing the schedule in a way that favored well-funded and establishment-friendly candidates—there was no great outcry from Democrats. In fact, New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley, a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, explained that the Democrats would probably follow the Republican lead on a number of scheduling issues because, after all, “it is a choreographed dance that includes the RNC, the DNC, and of course, the states.”83
By the fall of 2015, in fact, there was a good case to be made that when it came to scheduling debates, the Democratic National Committee was doing more damage to democracy—and to its own prospects—than the Republican National Committee. Two months after the Republican presidential candidates had started debating, the Democratic contenders were still waiting to take the stage. The Democratic schedule was so constrained, so restrictive, and so obviously intended to protect frontrunner Hillary Clinton from scrutiny that candidate Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland who eight years earlier had backed Clinton, told a DNC meeting:
Think about it. The Republicans stand before the nation, malign our president’s record of achievements, denigrate women and immigrant families, double-down on trickle-down, and tell their false story. We respond with crickets, tumbleweeds, and a cynical move to delay and limit our own party debates. Four debates and only four debates—we are told, not asked—before voters in our earliest states make their decision. This is totally unprecedented in our party. This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before.
Calling for more debates, O’Malley bluntly declared, “We are the Democratic Party, not the Undemocratic Party. If we are to debate debates, the topic should be how many, not how few.”84
As the stilted and dysfunctional 2016 campaign developed, it became increasingly evident that both of the nation’s dominant political organizations had become Undemocratic Parties.
WHAT IF THEY GAVE AN ELECTION AND NOBODY CAME?
The great mass of Americans are not invited to the dance, so it should come as no surprise that they do not attend.
Voter participation in the United States, the first and most basic measure of democratic engagement, is declining to record-low levels. The decline has been sharp; so dramatic, in fact, that it raises profound questions about the viability of the American electoral process as a structure for engaging the great mass of citizens—and for constructing local, state, and federal governments that represent and advance the interests of the great mass of citizens.
Consider this: the 2014 midterm elections in the United States were the most costly in the history of the republic—with an overall price tag far in excess of the more than $4 billion formally reported for congressional elections.85 They were aggressively fought and for good reason: a great deal was at stake. Control of the US Senate was up for grabs, and with it the ability of President Obama and his Democratic allies to guide the legislative agenda of the nation, to secure approval of nominees to the US Supreme Court and the federal bench, to open up or shut down investigations, to force compromises on questions of taxation and spending. At the state level, where the brutal battles over labor rights, public education, and social services had played out over the previous four years, the overwhelming majority of governorships and legislative seats were up for election.86 Former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour announced that “the most important election for Republicans is 2014, not 2016.” Vice President Joe Biden echoed the theme. “Folks,” he shouted at a rally in Iowa, “this election is even more important than the two elections [where] you elected Barack and me.”87
Even allowing for election-season hyperbole, it was clear that this election was a big deal. The wealthiest and most self-interested billionaires in America wore their hands out signing checks to finance the most intense campaigning the country had ever seen in a midterm election. The president jetted from battleground state to battleground state on a frenzied final schedule that literally had him crossing paths with top Republican campaigners on airport tarmacs. Thousands of candidates ran themselves ragged, tens of thousands of volunteers woke early and went to bed late in a final push toward an Election Day that produced results so dramatic that they drew not just domestic but international attention. The top-line results were good news for Republicans who took control of the US Senate, held the US House, and expanded their position of strength in the states. Yet, as the New York Times noted in an editorial published a week after the election, while the numbers were “bad for Democrats, [they were] even worse for democracy.”88
If you met three Americans who were of voting age on the morning after Election Day 2014, two of them did not cast a ballot. The two nonvoters would, on balance, be younger and poorer than the one voter—meaning that a small, older, and relatively affluent minority picked the winners and defined the governance of the most powerful country in the world for the next two years. According to an analysis by U.S. News and World Report, “in exit polls from [the] midterms, for example, only 13 percent of voters were under 30. Nonvoters are also more racially diverse than the voting. . . . More than 40 percent of likely nonvoters in the 2014 elections identified as Hispanic, black or other racial/ethnic minorities, compared with 22 percent of likely voters.”89 Vermont Senator Sanders reflected on those figures and said, “We should not be satisfied with a ‘democracy’ in which more than 60 percent of our people don’t vote and some 80 percent of young people and low-income Americans fail to vote.”90
According to United States Elections Project estimates, just 33 percent of the voting-age population cast a ballot for the highest office on the ballot. That’s less than the 36 percent turnout figure generally reported after the 2014 elections because the United States disenfranchises millions of American adults who are imprisoned, on probation, on parole, or who face other roadblocks to being able to vote.91 But even using the restrictive standards that get us to the 36 percent figure, the collapse in participation was dramatic. The nation’s most populous states, all of which had contests for governor, lower-level statewide posts, congressional seats, and in some cases US Senate seats, saw dismal turnout: 28 percent in Texas, 29 percent in New York, 31 percent in California. Forty-three states reported turnouts of less than 50 percent, which meant that their elections were decided by a minority of eligible voters.92
Turnout in 2014 was the worst since 1942, when the United States had just entered World War II. And a number of states, as U.S. News and World Report noted, “saw nosedives of crazy proportions”—drops of 10 percent or more from the rates seen in the relatively low-turnout 2010 election.93
Let’s make this more concrete. Following both the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, the pundits and news media were pontificating about how Americans had rejected Obama’s policies and wanted a more conservative approach to governing. The implication was that millions of Americans got a taste of the Democrats and then switched over to the Republicans. One could logically conclude that Americans were clinically insane as they flip-flopped every two years from Democratic landslides to Republican landslides. In fact, very little of that happened. Instead, the younger and poorer Democrats simply stopped voting in midterm elections at much greater rates than did older and wealthier Republicans. This point is well understood in Republican circles, where repressing the voter turnout—especially among younger, poorer, and non-white citizens—has become job one for state governments over the past six years. But the approach is not new. In 1980 conservative political strategist Paul Weyrich laid out the strategy when he told a gathering of right-wing organizers, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”94
Mission Accomplished! In the 2014 election the Republicans won a whopping 59-seat advantage over the Democrats in the 435-member House of Representatives. Thanks to gerrymandered district lines—drawn largely by Republicans who won control of statehouses in the low-voter-turnout off-year elections of 2010—the Republicans were able to win 57 percent of the House seats with only 51 percent of the total votes for the 435 House races. But this is where it gets interesting: 2014 Republican House candidates nationwide—winners and losers—received the votes of only 16 percent of the voting-age citizens of the United States, less than 1 in 6 Americans. Things are around the same in the Senate, where all the Republican candidates for the hundred Senate seats received votes from just under 21 percent of the voting-age population, or one in five Americans.95 And, again, this is the “majority” party, with commanding control of Congress and a determination to use its power. But what sort of “mandate” did they really have with such flimsy popular support?** Matters were only marginally better for the Democrats the last time they controlled both the House and the Senate, following the 2008 election. The party’s candidates received the votes of 26 and 28 percent of the voting-age population, respectively, or just more than one in four.
Groups that monitor voter turnout, such as the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, regularly rank the United States near rock bottom on global turnout measures.96 Voter turnout in the United States is less than half that of countries with established electoral systems that actually promote high levels of participation. “Regardless of which metric of eligibility you use,” statistician Howard Steven Friedman noted in a 2012 Huffington Post Politics piece, “the United States has one of the lowest voter turnouts of any of the comparator countries.”97
Compare the United States with Germany, a large stable democracy with which the United States is in frequent competition and collaboration. When we interviewed Germans about elections practices, the first thing they told us was that their country did not have a perfect democracy. Yet, the 2013 elections that Germans generally identified as dull and that produced a predictable finish, drew a turnout of just under 72 percent. That was almost 20 percent more than the turnout in 2012 among the overall voting-age population of the United States.98 But Germans were not electing a president. Germans were choosing a new Bundestag, which in turn would identify a chancellor. So, though the electoral structures are different, the 2013 German election closely paralleled the 2014 election for the US House of Representatives. If we make this comparison, then Germany, after a “boring” election that drew a turnout on the low side of historic patterns, is doubling midterm election participation in the United States. And Germany’s turnout rates are far from the highest among established democracies around the world. In France, turnout in the 2012 presidential election topped 80 percent. In Sweden, turnout for the 2014 parliamentary elections was 86 percent. Uruguay’s 2014 presidential election drew more than 90 percent.99 Those countries are not outliers. The United States is.
The United States is barely on the democratic grid when it comes to representative democracy. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance ranks the United States 120th among countries of the world for turnout by eligible voters, and 138th for turnout among voting-age adults.100 Turnout in the United States among eligible voters used to be higher—often above 70 percent in presidential and midterm elections during the nineteenth century and still coming close to 65 percent among eligible voters and the overall voting-age population as recently as 1960. But the research of the United States Election Project reveals a marked decline since the 1970s.101
Americans tend to vote more during periods of crisis and when they believe their vote might actually make life better. The 1924 presidential election was held in relatively prosperous and tranquil times. In a three-way race where the Progressive candidate Robert M. La Follette drew 16 percent of the vote, President Calvin Coolidge coasted to victory with 15.7 million votes, or 54 percent of the total cast. Twelve years later, in the Great Depression election of 1936, the Republican presidential candidate, Alf Landon, was demolished by FDR, getting only 36.5 percent of the vote in what is regarded as perhaps the greatest landside in American presidential history. But loser Landon got almost one million more votes than winner Coolidge did in 1924. What happened? The turnout rate of voting-age Americans increased from 44 percent in 1924 to 57 percent in 1936. Roosevelt did not cruise to victory by convincing Republicans to switch teams. Instead, many millions of Americans came to the polls for the first time and voted for the Democrat. Indeed, in 1936 FDR got over 14 million more votes than the combined 1924 vote of La Follette and the Democratic candidate, John W. Davis. FDR came very close to getting more votes on his own in 1936 than all three presidential candidates—Coolidge, Davis, and La Follette—together received in 1924.
If the promise of American democracy is ever going to realized, it will not be because the dwindling number of mostly older, whiter, and richer voters start to cast ballots for different candidates and parties. It will be because of a surge of new voters. Turnout will need to get much closer to 80 percent to be legitimate. And that means guaranteeing the right to vote for all voting-age Americans, making it the aggressive policy of the government to do all it can to encourage people to vote, and to ensure that elections decide essential issues that are now held off the table. This is what Bernie Sanders and his supporters are talking about when they speak of “a political revolution.” No change of consequence, certainly no change for the better, will come within the narrow confines of the low-information, low-engagement, low-turnout politics that now defines our “democracy.”
How did America’s politics become so decayed and dysfunctional? Why is this country barreling toward citizenless democracy? The way to answer that question is to examine the democratic infrastructure, and to recognize the necessary role it plays in sustaining a strong democracy. America has a rich and notable history in this regard, one that has played a prominent role in the nation’s development and that has inspired the world. Today’s rulers prefer that this history be ignored. If, on the other hand, the history is restored to the people, it provides a remarkable set of tools for renewing and extending democracy in America. It is time to exhume the tools. With this history of the development of democratic infrastructure we can better understand the current predicament, and generate a vision and a roadmap for truly empowering citizens to make the essential economic issues that are now off the table the essential political issues they must be. This is the key to making the United States into a self-governing society, and to making the United States of the twenty-first century a place of prosperity and hope for all Americans.
* Confirming what he refers to as “the narrative that the economic recovery so far has only boosted the incomes of the rich, and it has yielded no improvement for the bottom 99 percent of the distribution,” Wolfers noted that “after adjusting for inflation, the average income for the richest 1 percent (excluding capital gains) has risen from $871,100 in 2009 to $968,000 over 2012 and 2013. By contrast, for the remaining 99 percent, average incomes fell by a few dollars from $44,000 to $43,900.”
* Note to pundits: Can we please stop using the phrase “the people have spoken” after each of these low-turnout elections? How about: “If you meet six people, maybe one of them wanted this result.”