EMAIL DETAILS

What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it
Democracy in America
with 26 comments

It appears that Simon beat me to commenting on Third World America,
Arianna Huffington’s bleak portrait of many of the things that are
wrong with America (crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, extreme
inequality, low social mobility, political system captured by special
interests, etc.), so I’ll confine myself to a couple of thoughts I had
while reading it.*

First, there are these great quotations from Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America (p. 45 of Huffington’s book):

“Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay
in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general
equality of condition among the people. . . .

“Democratic laws generally tend to promote the welfare of the greatest
possible number; for they emanate from the majority of the citizens,
who are subject to error, but who cannot have an interest opposed to
their own advantage.”

Now, Tocqueville was no naïve idealist. I read a big chunk of
Democracy in America in college (the “cube,” we called it, because it
was so thick) and read The Old Regime and the Revolution in graduate
school, and Tocqueville is one of the two conservatives I most
respect, along with Edmund Burke. He knew the importance of
institutions and the dangers of trying to overthrow them all at once,
and hence his distaste for the ideological zealots of the French
Revolution. America, he thought, was different, because of its strong
institutions and public sphere.

But today, Tocqueville’s observations no longer ring true. America is
no longer a land of equality, and it’s largely because our democratic
system no longer promotes “the welfare of the greatest possible
number.” And that’s because many citizens are only too eager to
support policies that are “opposed to their own advantage,” like the
then-popular (and apparently still-popular) Bush tax cuts, which
shifted the relative tax burden from the rich onto the middle class.**
What Tocqueville underestimated was the power of money in modern
politics and the marketing genius of modern politicians, which have
freed democratic politics from the constraints of the actual interests
of the majority.

Second . . . I think I’ll hold off on second until another post.

* I got a free copy from the publisher.

** Yes, income taxes on the middle class went down a bit. But if we
assume that government spending must eventually be paid for, it’s the
relative distribution of the tax burden that matters. If we assume
instead that government spending will be reduced, those reductions
will affect the middle class (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) much
more than the rich.