There are obvious parallels between the “America First” sentiment of Donald Trump and the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. So, it was interesting that Jonathon Porritt, one of Britain’s most influential liberal thinkers and environmentalists, was invited to attend a recent conference in which U.S. thought leaders reviewed the health of America’s democracy. Mr. Porritt shares his observations about the conference in this post. If any readers would like to respond, send comments to pcapfeedback@gmail.com.
The first thing to say is that I came away from the conference feeling remarkably hopeful – to be in the presence of so many dedicated people, all resolutely focused on what needs to be done to restore “the heart of American democracy”, was seriously inspirational. Solutions to all of the problems raised popped up irrepressibly, at federal, state and community level. There was no reason to suppose that American citizens cannot “retrieve the better angels of our nature”.
But such hopefulness could only emerge from a blisteringly honest analysis of just how bad things are, and how close to the edge things have come. In a moment of high drama, one of the speakers asked participants how many of them “still believed that the Republic will survive” after the coup d’état of Donald Trump’s election. Hands weren’t counted, but I estimated that around three-quarters thought it would survive – still leaving a quarter of people contemplating a descent into further decline and authoritarianism. However bad things may be here in the UK, there’s no talk of the entire system collapsing. But as the analysis deepened, layer by layer, I began to see why people might have reached such a conclusion...
The concentration of wealth – with today’s “winner-takes-all-inequality” – beggars belief. The top 10% of Americans own around 80% of the nation’s wealth, with 20% shared amongst the remaining 90%. It gets worse every year, as a matter of course. And that means more than 43 million Americans are living in harsh poverty, many working at the current federal minimum wage – today’s “starvation wage”.
Women make up nearly two-thirds of all minimum-wage workers. America is now “one of the most socially immobile” countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)…Yet most U.S. politicians – including most Democrats – won’t talk about poverty per se. Only Bernie Sanders sought to challenge that silence during the presidential race.
One speaker laid out for us in grisly detail how billions of dollars have been deployed over the last two decades to shift the bias of U.S. democracy towards right-wing ideas and policy positions of one kind or another. As she pointed out, the cumulative effect of this massively corrupting influence will continue to unfold for many years, given the reluctance of both parties to challenge the status quo on campaign funding. And it’s the “left behind” who will be impacted most cruelly: “What we have today is an alliance of the winners and losers of globalization: The winners write the rules, and the losers provide the votes.”
For many Americans, race is seen as “the litmus test of how well our democracy is doing”. In his inflammatory appeals to poor white voters, underpinned by an obsessive determination to destroy the legacy of America’s first black president, Trump has clearly benefited from the cultivation of systemic racism over the last 50 years. As another speaker put it, “Racism has infected every part of our body politic”.
I guess the thing that shocked me most was the account of all the different ways in which the basic democratic rights of millions of U.S. citizens have been eroded away over the last 20 years or so. Some of these things (gerrymandering to fix election boundaries, voter suppression and so on) have been around for decades, but at nothing like the degree of intensity as can be seen today…
(T)he systematic manipulation of social media for electoral purposes was exposed time after time as an increasingly malign influence in U.S. politics. Forget the ‘Russia stuff’, we were told; it’s the evolution of fake news, fake media outlets and insidious micro-targeting of voters into full-on Chinese authoritarianism that we should all be focused on…
There was little beating around the bush here: The Democrats bear a large share of the responsibility for the current crisis in America’s democracy. The working class no longer looks to the Democrats for any kind of political support, given their continuing and chronic failure to understand the extremes of poverty, racism and exclusion that now scar the face of American democracy. The Democrats’ narrative is seen by many as patronizing, detached and unapologetically elitist. And there’s a fierce battle going on for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, at a time when they should be ruthlessly focused on attacking all that Trump and the Conservative Right stand for.
My short walk-on role at this wonderful conference was to provide some Brexit analogies: drawing out any conclusions about the state of British democracy that might resonate with a U.S. audience. So, I linked my analysis to the self-same 40-year legacy of neoliberalism, leading directly to the same pattern of privatization and financialization, to the same kind of concentration of wealth, the same chronic poverty, the same unending erosion of public services in the name of austerity, the same careless disregard for the fate of those left behind by outsourcing and globalization, the same deep resentment – and the same casting of votes as a cry of rage.
Our democracy may not yet be in as bad a situation as I now understand American democracy to be in. As one speaker put it, “This great experiment of ours is now at risk as never before”. But the direction of travel is the same, and the potential consequences equally grave.