I find it hard to imagine a better text! This book will make your students understand how the American government functions while forcing them to think for themselves. William A. Michael Parenti has taught political and social science at a number of colleges and universities, and now devotes himself full time to writing and guest lecturing.
Various writings of his have been translated into some twenty languages. Most historians say little about the plight of the common folk in early America. Most of the White population consisted of poor freeholders, artisans, A Constitution for the Few 7 tenants, and indentured servants, the latter entrapped in payless servitude for years. A study of Delaware farms at about the time of the Constitutional Convention found that the typical farm family might have a large plot of land but little else, surviving in a one-room house or log cabin, without barns, sheds, draft animals, or machinery.
The farmer and his family pulled the plow. Small farmers were burdened by heavy rents, ruinous taxes, and low incomes. To survive, they frequently had to borrow money at high interest rates. To meet their debts, they mortgaged their future crops and went still deeper into debt. Interest rates on debts ranged from 25 to 40 percent, and taxes fell most heavily on those of modest means. Economic prisoners crowded the jails, incarcerated for debts or nonpayment of taxes.
Angry armed crowds in several states began blocking foreclosures and forcibly freeing debtors from jail. In the winter of , impoverished farmers in western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays took up arms. Their rebellion was forcibly put down by the state militia after several skirmishes that left eleven men dead and scores wounded.
The framers of the Constitution could agree with Madison when he wrote also in Federalist No. The first are the rich and the wellborn, the other the mass of the people. The delegates spent many weeks debating and defending their interests, but these were the differences of merchants, slaveholders, and manufacturers, a debate of haves versus haves in which each group sought safeguards in the new Constitution for its particular concerns.
Added to this were disagreements about constitutional structure. A Constitution for the Few 9 How might the legislature be organized? How much representation should the large and small states have? How should the executive be selected? The founders decided on a bicameral legislation, consisting of a House of Representatives elected every two years in its entirety and a Senate with sixyear staggered terms. It was decided that seats in the House would be allocated among the states according to population, while each state, regardless of population, would have two seats in the Senate.
On these issues, there were no poor farmers, artisans, indentured servants, or slaves attending the convention to proffer an opposing viewpoint. Ordinary working people could not take off four months to go to Philadelphia and write a constitution. The debate between haves and have-nots never took place. Not surprisingly, Article I, Section 8, that crucial portion of the Constitution that enables the federal government to serve the interests of investment property, was adopted within a few days with little debate.
Some of the delegates were land speculators who invested in western holdings. Accordingly, Congress was given the power to regulate and protect all western territorial property. Most of the delegates speculated in government securities, inflated paper scrip that the earlier Confederation had issued to pay soldiers and small suppliers.
Wealthy speculators bought from impoverished holders huge amounts of these nearly worthless securities for a trifling. Under Article VI, all debts incurred by the Confederation were valid against the new government, a provision that allowed the speculators to reap enormous profits by cashing in the inflated scrip at face value.
The payment of the debt came out of the pockets of the general public and went into the pockets of moneyed individuals who were creditors to the government by virtue of their possessing the inflated scrip. This federally assumed debt consumed nearly 80 percent of the annual federal revenue during the s. Slavery—considered a major form of property—was afforded special accommodation in the Constitution.
This gave the slave states a third more representation in Congress than was otherwise merited. This disproportionate distribution of seats helped the slave interests to pass laws that extended slavery into new territories and discouraged Congress from moving toward abolition.
The Constitution never abolished the slave trade. Indeed, the importation of slaves was explicitly guaranteed for another twenty years until , after which there would be the option—but no requirement—that it be abolished. Many slaveholders assumed they would have enough political clout to keep the trade going beyond that year. Slaves who escaped from one state to another had to be delivered up to the original owner upon claim, a provision Article IV, Section 2 that was unanimously adopted at the Convention.
This measure was to prove a godsend to the industrial barons a century later when the U. Army was used repeatedly to break mass strikes by miners and railroad and factory workers.
They separated the executive, legislative, and judicial functions and then provided a system of checks and balances between the three branches, including staggered elections, executive veto, the possibility of overturning the veto with a two-thirds majority in both houses, Senate confirmation of appointments and ratification of treaties, and a bicameral legislature.
They contrived an elaborate and difficult process for amending the Constitution, requiring proposal by two-thirds of both the Senate and the House and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. The propertyless majority, as Madison pointed out in Federalist No. Not only should the low-income majority be prevented from coalescing, its upward thrust upon government also should be blunted with indirect forms of representation.
Direct popular election of the Senate was achieved in when the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted— years after the Philadelphia Convention—demonstrating that the Constitution is sometimes modifiable in a democratic direction, though it does seem to take a bit of time. Senatorial elections were to be staggered, with only a third of the Senate facing election every two years, thereby minimizing a sweeping change. The president was to be selected by an electoral college whose members, by , were elected by the people in only five states, and by state legislatures or county sheriffs in the other eleven states.
As anticipated by the framers, the Electoral College would act as a damper on popular sentiment. It was believed they usually would be unable to muster a majority for any one candidate, and that the final selection would be left to the House, with each state delegation therein having only one vote. The Supreme Court was to be elected by no one, its justices being appointed to life tenure by the president, with confirmation by the Senate. The only portion of government to be directly elected by the people was the House of Representatives.
Many of the delegates were against this arrangement. They were concerned that with direct elections demagogues would ride into office on a populist tide only to pillage the treasury and wreak havoc on the wealthy class. Will such men be the secure and faithful Guardians of liberty? Even among those African Americans who had gained their freedom in both North and South, few were allowed to vote. In a groundbreaking book published in , historian Charles Beard famously argued that the framers were guided by the interests of their affluent class.
Disputing Beard are those who say that the framers were concerned with higher things than just lining their purses. True, they were moneyed men who profited directly from policies initiated under the new Constitution, but they were motivated by a concern for nation building that went beyond their particular class interests.
That is exactly the point: high-mindedness is a common attribute among people even when, or especially when, they are pursuing their personal and class interests. The fallacy is to presume that there is a dichotomy between the desire to build a strong nation and the desire to protect wealth and that the framers could not have been motivated by both. In fact, like most other people, they believed that what was good for themselves was ultimately good for their country.
Indeed, the problem is that most people too easily and self-servingly believe in their own virtue. The founders were no exception. They never doubted the nobility of their effort and its importance for the generations to come.
The point is not that they were devoid of the grander sentiments of nation building, but that there was nothing in their concept of nation that worked against their class interest and a great deal that worked for it. The framers may not have been solely concerned with getting their own hands in the till, although enough of them did, but they were explicitly concerned with defending the interests of the wealthy few from the laboring many.
What was at stake for Hamilton, Livingston, and their opponents was more than speculative windfalls in securities; it was the question, what kind of society would emerge from the revolution when the dust had settled, and on which class the political center of gravity would come to rest. Not too long before, many of them had been proponents of laissez-faire and had A Constitution for the Few 13 opposed a strong central government.
In truth, it was not their minds that were so much broader but their economic interests. Their motives were no higher than those of any other social group struggling for place and power in the United States of But possessing more time, money, information, and organization, they enjoyed superior results. Though supposedly dedicated to selfless and upright goals, the delegates nevertheless bound themselves to the strictest secrecy. Proceedings were conducted behind locked doors and shuttered windows despite the sweltering Philadelphia summer.
Deliberating behind closed doors, these wealthy men gave voice to the crassest class prejudices and most disparaging opinions about popular involvement. Their dedication to their propertied class interests were so unabashedly avowed as to cause one delegate, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, to complain of hearing too much about how the primary object of government was property.
The cultivation and improvement of the human mind, he maintained, was the most noble objective of the polity—a fine sentiment that evoked no opposition from his colleagues as they continued about their business.
The Constitution furnished special provisions for the slaveholding class and for a rising bourgeoisie. For the founders, liberty meant something different from democracy. It meant liberty to invest, speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth without encroachment by the common populace. The democratic civil liberties designed to give all individuals the right to engage in public affairs won little support from the delegates.
If the Constitution was such an elitist document, how did it manage to win ratification? It was strongly opposed in most of the states. The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against their opponents. What is more, the Constitution never was submitted to a popular vote. Ratification was by state conventions, each composed of delegates drawn mostly from the same affluent stratum as the framers.
Those who voted for these delegates themselves usually had to qualify as property holders. Probably not more than 20 percent of the adult White males voted for delegates to the ratifying conventions. No property qualifications were required for any federal officeholder, unlike in England and most of the states. And salaries were provided for all officials, thus rejecting the common practice of treating public office as a voluntary service that only the rich could afford.
No one could claim a life tenure on any elective office. Bills of attainder, the practice of declaring by legislative fiat a specific person or group of people guilty of an offense, without benefit of a trial, were made unconstitutional. Also outlawed were ex post facto laws, the practice of declaring some act to be a crime and then punishing those who had committed it before it was made unlawful. There was strong popular sentiment for a Bill of Rights.
In order to ensure ratification, supporters of the new Constitution pledged the swift adoption of such a bill as a condition for ratification. So, in the first session of Congress, the first ten amendments were swiftly passed and then adopted by the states. These rights included freedom of speech and religion; freedom to assemble peaceably and to petition for redress of grievances; the right to keep arms; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; freedom from self-incrimination, double jeopardy, cruel and unusual punishment, and excessive bail and fines; the right to a fair and impartial trial; and other forms of due process.
The Bill of Rights, specifically the Ninth Amendment, explicitly acknowledges that the people have a reserve of rights that go beyond the Constitution. Religion was to be something apart from government, supported only by its own believers and not by the taxpayer—a stricture that often has been violated in practice. Contrary to the notion propagated today by many religionists, the founders did not establish this nation upon religious principles. Benjamin Franklin openly questioned the divinity of Jesus.
If the delegates in Philadelphia were intent upon inaugurating a Christian republic, why does the Constitution contain not a single reference to God, Jesus, or Christianity? Yet few dared venture in that direction out of fear of popular opposition. Furthermore, delegates like Madison believed that stability for their class order was best assured by a republican form of government.
The time had come for the rich bourgeoisie to rule directly without the troublesome intrusions of parasitic nobles and kings. On a number of occasions during the Philadelphia Convention, this assemblage of men who feared and loathed democracy found it necessary to show some regard for popular sentiment as with the direct election of the lower house.
If the Constitution was going to be accepted by the states and if the new government was to have any stability, it had to gain some measure of popular acceptance. While the delegates and their class dominated the events of —, they were far from omnipotent. The class system they sought to preserve was itself the cause of marked restiveness among the people. Land seizures by the poor, food riots, and other violent disturbances occurred throughout the eighteenth century in just about every state and erstwhile colony.
This popular ferment spurred the framers in their effort to erect a strong central government, but it also set a limit on what they could do. They kept what they could and grudgingly relinquished what they felt they had to, driven not by a love of democracy but by a fear of it, not by a love of the people but by a prudent desire to avoid riot and insurgency. The Constitution, then, was a product not only of class privilege but of class struggle—a struggle that continued as the corporate economy and the government grew.
Poverty and overcrowding brought cholera and typhoid epidemics, causing the wealthy to flee the cities, while the poor—having nowhere to go and no way to get there even if they did—stayed and died. Living in misery, many impoverished people were addicted to alcohol and drugs mostly opium. Children as young as nine and ten toiled fourteenhour shifts, falling asleep at the machines they tended, suffering from malnutrition and sickness.
Slaves were used to lay railroads, construct oil lines, harvest tobacco and cotton, and dig for coal, salt, and marble. For more than sixty years, well into the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of indigent African Americans were forced to toil at construction sites, railroads, mines, and large farms under slave labor conditions.
Arrested for trivial offenses such as gambling or foul language, they had to work off the inflated costs of their keep, which they invariably were unable to do. Subjected to whippings and torture, unsafe work conditions, and wretched food and housing, tens of thousands perished. One of the biggest users of this convict slave labor was a subsidiary of U. Steel Corporation. Civil authorities intervened almost invariably on Rise of the Corporate State 19 the side of the owning class to quell disturbances and crush strikes.
Four anarchist leaders—none of whom had been present—were tried and hanged for having printed appeals some days earlier that supposedly inspired the incident. The two strike leaders were dragged from jail and lynched. In , Pinkerton gun thugs hired by a steel company killed nine striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. The strike was eventually broken by the National Guard. In , U. Army troops killed thirty-four railroad workers who were among those on strike against the Pullman company.
Over the next few years, scores of striking coal miners were murdered. In , faced with a general strike that began in Seattle and spread elsewhere, the U. Attorney General arrested more than , workers in seventy cities across the nation. That same year in Arkansas, over one hundred striking cotton pickers were massacred by U. In , the Chicago police fired upon a peaceful crowd of striking steel workers, killing ten and wounding over forty.
An additional six strikers were killed on picket lines in Ohio. The industrial barons regularly called state militia and federal soldiers to their assistance. The same government that could not find the constitutional 20 Chapter 3 means to eliminate contaminated foods and befouled water supplies could use federal troops to break strikes, shoot hundreds of workers, and slaughter thousands of Native Americans.
And statutes intended to outlaw monopolies and trade conspiracies were rarely used except against labor unions. While insisting that competition worked best for all, most business people showed little inclination to deliver themselves to the exacting imperatives of an untrammeled free market. Instead they resorted to ruthless business practices to squeeze out competitors.
So by the s, John D. At the same time the big corporations gorged themselves at the public trough, battening on fat government contracts, subsidies, land grants, and protective tariffs. The Constitution makes no mention of corporations.
For the first few decades of the new nation, corporate charters were issued sparingly for specific purposes and fixed periods, usually of twenty or thirty years. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations or any land beyond what they needed for their business.
Corporate records were open to public scrutiny; and state legislatures limited the rates that corporations could charge. In time, with the growing power of the business class, all such democratic controls were eliminated, and corporations emerged as powers unto themselves. The idea of a fair price and safe product for consumers was replaced with the doctrine of caveat emptor let the buyer beware.
Workers were killed or maimed in unsafe work conditions, without employers being held liable. This benevolent government handed over to its friends or to astute first comers, … all those treasures of coal and oil, of copper and gold and iron, the land grants, the terminal sites, the perpetual rights of way—an act of largesse which is still one of the wonders of history.
The Tariff Act of was in itself a sheltering wall of subsidies; and to aid further the new heavy industries and manufactures, an Immigration Act allowing contract labor to be imported freely was quickly enacted; a national banking system was perfected. Yet democratic struggle persisted. In pursuit of a living wage and decent work conditions, labor unions repeatedly regrouped their shattered ranks to fight pitched battles against the industrial moguls.
One important victory was the defeat of the Rise of the Corporate State 21 Southern slavocracy in the Civil War and the abolition of legalized slavery. During Reconstruction — the former Confederate states were put under federal military occupation. The new state governments set up in the South by the U. Congress decreed universal suffrage for males of all races and incomes, along with popular assemblies, fairer taxes, schools for the poor, and some limited land reform.
But once the Northern capitalists allied themselves with the Southern oligarchs and put an end to Reconstruction, better to face their joint struggles against laborers and farmers, most of these democratic gains were rolled back, not to be recouped until well into the next century—if then. During the — period, known as the Progressive Era, federal laws were enacted to protect consumers and workers from unsafe conditions in such industries as meatpacking, food and drugs, banking, timber, and mining.
Often these regulations mandated expensive improvements and safety features that were designed to advantage the strongest companies at the expense of smaller competitors.
Neither William Howard Taft nor Woodrow Wilson, the other two White House occupants of that period, launched any serious operations against big business. Wilson, a Democrat, railed against giant trusts but his campaign funds came from a few rich contributors. He worked with associates of Morgan and Rockefeller about as closely as any Republican. Several states passed minimum-wage laws, and thirty-eight states enacted child labor laws restricting the age children could be employed and the hours they could work.
Even so, much of the reform legislation went unenforced or proved ineffectual. Millions toiled twelve- and fourteen-hour days, six or seven days a week. According to government figures, 2 million children had to work in order to supplement the family income. As of , millions worked for wages that could not adequately feed a family. Each year 35, were killed on the job, while , suffered serious injuries and work-related disabilities.
Large sectors of the economy were converted to war production along lines proposed by business leaders. Strikes were now treated as seditious interference with war production.
Federal troops raided and ransacked union headquarters and imprisoned large numbers of workers suspected of radical sympathies. Harsh sentences were dealt out to labor organizers, socialists, and anarchists. Later that year, the U. The public was treated to lurid stories of how the Bolsheviks Russian Communists were about to invade the United States, and how they were murdering anyone in their own country who could read or write or who wore a white collar. As Secretary of State Robert Lansing noted, the Russian Revolution was a bad example to the common people in other nations, including the United States.
Stock speculations and other get-rich-quick schemes abounded. But the bulk of the population lived under conditions of severe want, often lacking basic necessities. It seemed almost incredible that such conditions of poverty could really exist. Consumer demand could not keep up with production. Employees were not paid enough to buy back the goods and services they produced. As supplies and inventories piled up, businesses cut back on their workforce, intensifying the downward spiral.
There was no national system of unemployment insurance and few pension plans. Farmers lost their farms; crops rotted while millions went hungry.
Those lucky enough to still have jobs during the Great Depression of the s faced increasingly oppressive work conditions: speedups, wage and salary cuts, and a deterioration in safety standards. This is one of the chief contributing causes of the present depression…. You cannot starve men employed in industry and depend upon them to purchase. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it. Between and , the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO organized millions of workers and won significant gains in wages and work conditions.
These victories were achieved only after protracted struggles in which many thousands occupied factories in sit-downs, or were locked out, blacklisted, beaten, and arrested; hundreds more were wounded or killed by police, soldiers, and company thugs.
The federal housing program subsidized construction firms and mortgage bankers—all of little benefit to the many millions of ill-housed. Many tenant farmers and sharecroppers were evicted when federal acreage rental programs took land out of cultivation. To bolster prices, the New Dealers paid farmers to destroy millions of acres of cotton crops, vast wheat reserves, and millions of hogs and piglets.
The stark contrast of overabundance and hunger caused many to question the serviceability of capitalism. Faced with mass unrest, the federal government created a variety of relief programs that eased some of the privation.
But as the New Deal moved toward measures that threatened to compete with private enterprises and undermine low wage structures, business withdrew its support and became openly hostile.
While infuriating Roosevelt, who saw himself as trying to rescue the capitalist system, business opposition enhanced his reformist image in the public mind.
For instance, the Civilian Conservation Corps CCC provided jobs at subsistence wages for only 3 million of the 15 million unemployed. At its peak, the Works Progress Administration WPA and related agencies employed almost 9 million people but often for unstable duration and grossly inadequate wages.
Of the millions who were earning subsistence wages, only about half a million were helped by the minimum-wage law. The Social Security Act of covered but half the population and provided paltry monthly payments with no medical insurance or protection against illness before retirement. Unemployment insurance covered only those who had enjoyed sustained employment in select occupations. Implementation was left to the states, which were free to set whatever restrictive conditions they chose.
But once the threat of political unrest subsided, federal relief was slashed, and large numbers of destitute people were thrust onto a labor market already glutted with unemployed.
When taxes were increased to pay for military spending in World War II, the major burden was taken up by middle- and low-income classes that had never before been subjected to income taxes. Millions of hungry and destitute people were fed and sheltered. The steep inequality in income was noticeably eased, thanks to stronger unions, greater regulation of industry, and progressive taxes on corporate profits and wealth. Under Social Security, working people won not only retirement pensions but disability insurance and survivors insurance for children of deceased workers.
The New Deal built or improved roads across the country, and constructed thousands of schools, parks, playgrounds, athletic fields, and airports, along with hundreds of hospitals, post offices, bridges, tunnels, and courthouses. The CCC created fifty-two thousand acres of public camp grounds, built over thirteen thousand foot trails, and restored almost four thousand historic landmarks or monuments.
It stocked waterways with millions of fish, made important contributions to firefighting, rodent and pest control, water conservation, and preventing soil erosion. Thousands of unemployed writers, actors, musicians, and painters were given modest support and opportunity to enrich the lives of many in performances that ordinary people could afford to attend.
Before the Roosevelt era, unions were readily broken by court injunctions, heavy fines, and violent repression. Management-controlled company unions were banned, and a minimum wage and forty-hour week were established. Congress set up the National Labor Relations Board NLRB with broad powers to oversee the certification of unions and penalize employers who violated the organizing rights of workers. They were ready to go a lot further than Roosevelt did, and probably would have accepted a nationalized banking system, a more massive job program, and a national health care system.
In regard to desegregation, open housing, fair employment practices, anti-lynch laws, and voting rights for Blacks, the New Deal did nothing. Domestics and farmworkers, the two most common occupations for African Americans at the time, were excluded from Social Security coverage.
African Americans were excluded from jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps, received less than their proportional share of public assistance, and under the NRA were frequently paid wages below the legal minimum. Those who profited most were the industrial tycoons and arms contractors. But some of it trickled down.
Almost all the 8. Only by entering the war and remaining thereafter on a permanent war economy was the United States able to significantly reduce unemployment. The ruling politicoeconomic elites were willing to make the kind of all-out spending effort to kill people in wartime that they would not make to assist people in peacetime. Along with the many small labor conflicts handled by local government, there developed large-scale class struggles—which had to be contained by the national government.
Government provided the subsidies, services, and protections that business could not provide for itself. The corporate economy needed a corporate state. While the populace won formal rights to participate as voters, the state with its courts, police, and army remained mostly at the disposal of the moneyed class. However, working people were not without resources of their own, specifically the ability to disrupt and threaten the process of capital accumulation by withholding their labor through strikes, and by engaging in other acts of protest and resistance.
Such agitation wrested concessions from the owning class and the state. These victories fell short of achieving a social democracy but they represented important democratic gains for working people.
As our history shows, those on the left—liberals, progressives, and radicals—have fought for egalitarian and democratic reforms.
They opposed lynching and pushed for laws to abolish child labor. They pushed for the elimination of property qualifications and poll taxes for voting.
In just about every one of these instances, it was the wealthy plutocrats with some notable exceptions who resisted such reforms and who favored regressive taxes, massive public subsidies to big business, and repressive measures against political dissent and against labor unions. But the capitalist economy has an overbearing impact upon political and social life.
It deserves our attention. The very rich families and individuals who compose the owning class live mostly off investments, which include stocks, bonds, rents, mineral royalties, and other property income. Their employees live mostly off wages, salaries, and fees. The distinction between owners and employees is blurred somewhat by the range of incomes within both classes.
But the latter hardly qualify as part of the corporate owning class. Among the victims of big business is small business itself. Small businesses are just so many squirrels dancing among the elephants. Every year over thirty thousand of them get trampled and go out of business. Company managers and executives are employees whose task is to extract more value-producing performance from other employees.
Some top business executives, corporate lawyers, and entertainment and sports figures enjoy such huge incomes as to be able eventually to live off their investments, in effect becoming members of the owning class. The secret to great wealth is not to work hard but to have others work hard for you. This explains why workers who spend their lives toiling in factories or offices retire with relatively little if any funds to speak of, while the owners can amass considerable fortunes.
It is their real price; money is their nominal price only. The average private-sector employee works two hours for herself or himself and six or more hours for the boss.
Capitalists themselves have a similar concept: value added in manufacture. In the last half century, the overall average rate of value added the portion going to the owner in the United States more than doubled, far above the exploitation rate in other industrialized countries. Workers endure an exploitation of their labor as certainly as do slaves and serfs. The slave obviously toils for the enrichment of the master and receives only a bare subsistence in return. Slavery was a very profitable system.
Serfs and sharecroppers, who must give much of their crop to the landowner and carry out other unpaid tasks for him, are also obviously exploited. Under capitalism, however, the portion taken from the worker is not visible. Workers are simply paid substantially less than the value they create. Indeed, the only reason they are hired is so the owner can make money off their labor. If wages did represent the total value created by labor after expenses and improvements , there would be no surplus value, no profits for the owner, no great fortunes for those who do not labor.
Likewise, editors, proofreaders, printers, and salespersons all contribute labor that adds to the marketable value of the book. The sums going to owners are aptly called unearned income on tax reports. They are organizational devices for the exploitation of labor and accumulation of capital. The real producers are those who apply their brawn, brains, and talents to the creation of goods and services. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
Citizens are increasingly using initiatives and referendums to take the law into their own hands, overriding their elected officials to set tax, expenditure, and social policies. John G. Matsusaka's For the Many or the Few provides the first even-handed and historically based treatment of the subject. Drawing upon a century of evidence, Matsusaka argues against the popular belief that initiative measures are influenced by wealthy special interest groups that neglect the majority view.
Examining demographic, political, and opinion data, he demonstrates how the initiative process brings about systematic changes in tax and expenditure policies of state and local governments that are generally supported by the citizens.
He concludes that, by and large, direct democracy in the form of the initiative process works for the benefit of the many rather than the few. An unprecedented, comprehensive look at the historical, empirical, and theoretical components of how initiatives function within our representative democracy to increase political competition while avoiding the tyranny of the majority, For the Many or the Few is a most timely and definitive work.
The Sunday Times bestseller. Remarkable' Observer, Book of the Week Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it. This is the story of how money, vested interests and digital skulduggery are eroding trust in democracy.
Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, secretive lobbying is bending our politics out of shape and Silicon Valley tech giants collude in selling out democracy. Politicians lie gleefully, making wild claims that can be shared instantly with millions on social media. Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through the shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.
Praise for Democracy for Sale: 'Thorough, gripping and vitally important' Oliver Bullough 'A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. Everyone should read it' Anne Applebaum 'A compelling and very readable story of the ongoing corruption of our government and therefore ourselves' Anthony Barnett 'As urgent as it is illuminating' Fintan O'Toole 'This urgent, vital book is essential reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics' Carole Cadwalladr 'This forensic and highly readable book shows how so many of our democratic processes have moved into the murky, unregulated spaces of globalisation and digital innovation' Peter Pomerantsev 'A call to arms for all those who value democracy' The Herald 'Geoghegan's words are those of someone who is prepared to keep fighting to defend and revitalise what shadows of democracy still remain'Scotsman.
Two core components of liberal democracy--individual rights and the popular will--are at war, putting democracy itself at risk. In plain language, Yascha Mounk describes how we got here, where we need to go, and why there is little time left to waste. Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens.
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided.
They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties.
When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters.
Now with new analysis of the elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government. In The Democracy of Suffering philosopher Todd Dufresne provides a strikingly original exploration of the past, present, and future of this epoch, the Anthropocene, demonstrating how the twin crises of reason and capital have dramatically remade the essential conditions for life itself.
Images, cartoons, artworks, and quotes pulled from literary and popular culture supplement this engaging and unorthodox look into where we stand amidst the ravages of climate change and capitalist economics.
With humour, passion, and erudition, Dufresne diagnoses a frightening new reality and proposes a way forward, arguing that our serial experiences of catastrophic climate change herald an intellectual and moral awakening - one that lays the groundwork, albeit at the last possible moment, for a future beyond individualism, hate, and greed.
That future is unapologetically collective. It begins with a shift in human consciousness, with philosophy in its broadest sense, and extends to a reengagement with our greatest ideals of economic, social, and political justice for all.
But this collective future, Dufresne argues, is either now or never. Uncovering how we got into this mess and how, if at all, we get out of it, The Democracy of Suffering is a flicker of light, or perhaps a scream, in the face of human extinction and the end of civilization.
Why democracy is the most effective form of government despite irrational and sometime oblivious voters and flawed and sometimes inept politicians. Voters often make irrational decisions based on inaccurate and irrelevant information. Politicians are often inept, corrupt, or out of touch with the will of the people. Elections can be determined by the design of the ballot and the gerrymandered borders of a district.
And yet, despite voters who choose candidates according to the boxer—brief dichotomy and politicians who struggle to put together a coherent sentence, democracy works exceptionally well: citizens of democracies are healthier, happier, and freer than citizens of other countries. In Democracy Despite Itself, Danny Oppenheimer, a psychologist, and Mike Edwards, a political scientist, explore this paradox: How can democracy lead to such successful outcomes when the defining characteristic of democracy—elections—is so flawed?
Oppenheimer and Edwards argue that democracy works because regular elections, no matter how flawed, produce a variety of unintuitive, positive consequences.
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