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The fall and rise of American democracy
All four pillars of democracy’s promise seem broken to many Americans. But this doesn’t mean that they now prefer an alternative political arrangement.
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Tearful loss: A supporter cries as US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris delivers her concession speech at Howard University in Washington, DC, on November 6. (AFP/Charly Triballeau)
I
t should not have come as a great surprise that United States voters were largely unmoved by the Democrats’ warnings that Donald Trump poses a grave threat to US institutions. In a January 2024 Gallup poll, only 28 percent of Americans (a record low) said that they were satisfied with “the way US democracy is working”.
US democracy has long promised four things: shared prosperity, a voice for the citizenry, expertise-driven governance and effective public services. But US democracy, like democracy in other wealthy (and even middle-income) countries, has failed to fulfill these aspirations.
It wasn’t always so. For three decades following World War II, democracy delivered the goods, especially shared prosperity. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages increased 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 skyrocketed, and wages for workers without a college degree have barely increased. About half of the US workforce has watched incomes among the other half soar.
While the past ten years were somewhat better (the almost 40-year increase in inequality appears to have stopped sometime around 2015), the pandemic-induced surge in inflation took a big toll on working families, especially in cities. That is why so many Americans listed economic conditions as their main concern, ahead of democracy.
Equally important was the belief that democracy would give voice to all citizens. If something wasn’t right, you could let your elected representatives know. While this principle was never fully upheld, as many minorities have remained disenfranchised for much of US history, voter disempowerment has become an even more generalized problem over the past four decades. As the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it, many Americans, especially those without a college degree and living in the Midwest and the South, came to feel like “strangers in their own land”.
Worse, as this was happening, the Democrats moved from being the party of working people to becoming a coalition of tech entrepreneurs, bankers, professionals and postgraduates who share very few priorities with the working class. Yes, right-wing media also stoked working-class discontent, but it could do so because mainstream media sources and intellectual elites ignored the economic and cultural grievances of a significant share of the public. This trend has also accelerated over the last four years, with highly educated segments of the population and the media ecosystem constantly emphasizing identity issues that further alienated many voters.
If this was simply a case of technocrats and intellectual elites setting the agenda, one could tell oneself that at least the experts were at work. But the promise of expertise-driven governance has rung hollow at least since the 2008 financial crisis. It was experts who had designed the financial system, supposedly for the common good, and made huge fortunes on Wall Street because they knew how to manage risk. Yet, not only did this turn out to be untrue, but politicians and regulators rushed to rescue the culprits, while doing almost nothing for the millions of Americans who lost their homes and livelihoods.
