By Cliff Montgomery – Apr. 29th, 2014
A recent academic study appears to reveal a truth about America that grassroots causes like the Occupy movement state plainly: Democracy in this country no longer exists.
Benjamin Page of Northwestern University and Martin Gilens of Princeton have discovered that since the early 1980s, America’s democratic system has slowly devolved into an oligarchy – that is, a state of government in which a country’s few wealthy elites essentially rule as they please.
Culling their information from more than 1,800 policy actions over a 21-year period – specifically 1981-2002 – the scholars discovered that rich, politically well-connected individuals now essentially run the United States of America.
Page and Gilens add the data also reveal that the wealthy’s current political domination of the United States is strong enough for the rich to often get their way regardless of the clear desires of the American majority.
“The central point that emerges from our research,” wrote the scholars, “is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
The researchers further point out that one can’t play the political ‘blame game’ for America’s slide to oligarchy: Both Democrats and Republicans tend to make the whims of the wealthy the law of the land.
The two scholars appear to believe that the conservative tendencies which many Americans have exhibited since 1981 – the first year of Ronald Reagan’s popular administration – might help explain why this trend toward oligarchy has not been so clearly recognized.
Under such a mind-set, “ordinary citizens might often be observed to ‘win’ (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail,” wrote Page and Gilens.
Martin Gilens recently discussed the study’s findings with Talking Points Memo.
“I’d say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence,” Gilens told Talking Points Memo.
Thus American “government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups – of economic elites and of organized interests,” added the Princeton scholar.
