It should not have come as such a surprise that American voters were, to a large extent, impassive in the face of warnings from Democrats that Donald Trump poses a serious threat to American institutions. In a January 2024 Gallup poll, only 28% of Americans (a historic low) said they were satisfied with “the way American democracy works.”
Democracy in the United States has been promising for a long time four things: shared prosperity, voice for citizens, experience-based governance and efficient public services. But North American democracy – like that of other rich (and even middle-income) countries – has failed to fulfill these aspirationsespecially when it comes to the economy.
It wasn’t always like this. During the three decades following World War II, democracy provided the goods, especially shared prosperity. Real wages (adjusted for inflation) rose rapidly for all demographic groups, and inequality declined. But this trend came to an end sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, inequality has skyrocketedand wages for workers without college degrees have barely increased. About half of the American workforce has seen the incomes of the other half skyrocket.
Although the last ten years have been somewhat better (the nearly 40-year increase in inequality appears to have stopped around 2015), The pandemic-induced rise in inflation took a heavy toll to working families, especially in cities. That’s why so many Americans pointed out the economic situation as your main concernahead of democracy. Equally important was the belief that democracy would give all citizens a voice. If something was not right, one could let the elected representatives know.
Although this principle was never fully fulfilled –many minorities remained disenfranchised throughout much of American history-, disenfranchisement has become an even more widespread problem over the past four decades. As the sociologist says Arlie Russell Hochschildmany Americans, especially those without college degrees and living in the Midwest and South, came to feel like “foreigners in their own land”.
Worse yet, while this was happening, the Democrats went from being the workers’ party to becoming a coalition of technology entrepreneurs, bankers, professionals and postgraduates who share very few priorities with the working class. It is true, the right-wing media also stoked the discontent of the working class.
But they were able to do it because Mainstream media and intellectual elites ignored economic and cultural grievances of a significant part of the population. This trend has also accelerated in the last four years, in which the more educated segments of the population and the media ecosystem have constantly insisted on issues of identity that have further alienated many voters.
If it were simply a case of technocrats and intellectual elites that set the agenda, one could say that at least the experts were doing their job. But the promise of governance driven by the experience sounds empty at least since the financial crisis of 2008. It was the experts who designed the financial system, supposedly for the common good, and they made enormous fortunes on Wall Street because they knew how to manage risk.
However, not only did this turn out to be false, politicians and regulators were quick to rescue the guiltydoing almost nothing for the millions of Americans who lost their homes and livelihoods. The distrust How the population feels about experts has only grown, especially during the Covid-19 crisiswhen issues like lockdowns and vaccines became litmus tests for belief in science. Those who disagreed were duly silenced in the mainstream media and pushed into alternative outlets with rapidly growing audiences.
This brings us to the promise of public services. The British poet John Betjeman he once wrote that “our nation defends democracy and adequate drainage”but democracy’s provision of reliable drainage is increasingly in doubt. In some ways, the system is a victim of its own success. Beginning in the 19th century, the United States and many European countries enacted laws to ensure meritocratic selection and limiting corruption in public servicesfollowed by regulations to protect the population from new products, from cars to pharmaceuticals.
But as they have multiplied regulations and safety procedurespublic services have become less efficient. For example, public spending per mile of highway in the United States more than tripled between the years 1960 and 1980, due to the addition of new regulations and safety procedures. Similar declines in construction sector productivity have been attributed to onerous regulations around land use. Not only have costs increased, but procedures designed to ensure safe, transparent and citizen-friendly practices have led to long delays in all types of infrastructure projects, as well as deterioration in the quality of other services, including education.
In summary, the four pillars of the promise of democracy seem broken for many Americans. But this does not mean that Americans now prefer an alternative political arrangement. Americans still take pride in their country and recognize its democratic character as an important part of their identity. The good news is that democracy can be rebuilt and made more robust. The process must begin by focusing on shared prosperity and the voice of citizens, which means reducing the role of large fortunes in politics.
In the same way, although Democracy cannot be separated from technocratic experiencethe experience can be less politicized. Government experts should come from a broader range of social contexts, and it would also help if they were deployed more at the local government level.
Of course, None of this is likely to happen in the incoming Trump administration.. As an obvious threat to American democracy, it will erode many critical institutional norms over the next four years. The task of recreating democracy, therefore, falls to the center-left forces. They are the ones who must weaken their ties with Big Business and Big Tech and recover their working class roots.
If Trump’s victory is anything to go by wake up call for democratsmay have inadvertently launched a rejuvenation of American democracy.
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