Originally Posted by
Tooting Carmen
Trump was not as bad as Putin by any stretch, but that has as much or more to do with America's robust democratic system than him necessarily being a 'better' man.
Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study , published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'
Karl Marx argued that there is a gap in liberal capitalist society between the political sphere and what he calls “civil society,” meaning social and economic existence. In the former—at the ballot box, for example—men and women appear equal and autonomous, each of them counting as one; but this simply serves to mask the actual divisions, inequalities and dependencies of everyday life. It is as though the political dimension abstracts from these conditions, so that citizens become pale simulacra of themselves. Only if democratic self-government were extended to civil society itself—in, for example, workers’ self-management—would this gap be closed.
For Karl Marx, then, the liberal-democratic political sphere is less than fully real; and what we have witnessed in the West in recent years is a full-blooded reaction to this fact—not just a theoretical rejection of orthodox politics, but one that has taken to the streets in over-whelming numbers. It is not just this or that aspect of political life that has been discredited, but the political as such, so that the most powerful nation in the world elected as its leader a sinister buffoon(Trump) drafted in from reality TV—in fact, the very incarnation of unreality—rather than lend credence to the conventional political process. Not since the 1930s have we seen such a mass loss of faith in the liberal middle-class political consensus. There have been outbreaks of class warfare and talk of violent revolution, all of it fired by a fury, hatred and despair very far from the sedate, civilised climate of Westminster or Capitol Hill. The ruling class has been publicly trashed, mocked, hooted and howled down, which was not generally the case in the days of Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy. Politics has become a rough-house, in which you are likely to have your skull smashed in if you find yourself in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks