That’s why I consider our political polarization to be the most dangerous problem facing us Americans today—far more dangerous than competition from China or from Mexico, about which our political leaders obsess more. There is no way that China or Mexico can destroy the U.S. Only we Americans can destroy ourselves. We’ll return to this issue in the next chapter, after we’ve considered the other fundamental problems facing the U.S., and the factors favoring or opposing our making selective changes that would prevent that grim scenario.
CHAPTER 10
WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR THE UNITED STATES? THREE “OTHER” PROBLEMS
Other problems—Elections—Inequality and immobility—So what?—Investing in the future—Crisis framework
The previous chapter began with the good news about the United States today. The U.S. did not become the world’s richest and most powerful country by accident, but because of a combination of many advantages: demographic, geographic, political, historical, economic, and social. The remainder of the chapter presented the bad news: the current breakdown of political compromise that I regard as the most serious problem among the ones specifically facing the U.S. (as distinct from worldwide problems also threatening the U.S.).
This chapter will now discuss three “other” big problems, starting with our problems associated with voting. I lump these issues under the seemingly dismissive term “other problems” only because they don’t hold as much immediate potential for undermining American democratic government as does the breakdown of compromise. But they still are serious. Readers wanting to learn more will enjoy Howard Friedman’s book The Measure of a Nation, which includes dozens of graphs comparing the U.S. to other major democracies with respect to many of the variables discussed below. Of course, my list of U.S. problems isn’t exhaustive. Problems that I don’t discuss include race relations and the role of women, both of which are improved compared to 50 years ago but remain blights on American society. The four that I did select for discussion—the one of the previous chapter, and the three of this chapter—have unquestionably gotten worse in recent decades, and in my opinion constitute the most serious threats to American democracy and economic strength today.
Elections are the essence of any democracy. If a country has a constitution or laws specifying democratic government but the country’s citizens don’t or can’t vote, such a country doesn’t deserve to be called a democracy. By that standard, the U.S. is barely half-deserving of being called a democracy. Nearly half of American citizens eligible to vote don’t vote even for our most important elected office, that of president. In each of the four most recent presidential elections the number of eligible Americans who haven’t voted has been about 100 million. The percentage of citizens who don’t vote for lesser elected offices is much higher. For instance, my city of Los Angeles (LA) is one of the U.S.’s major cities, and LA’s most important elected official is our mayor. Nevertheless, in our most recent election for mayor of LA, 80% of eligible LA residents didn’t vote.
There are several alternative ways to express voter turnout for elections. One way is to report the percentage of residents old enough to vote who did vote. Another measure, yielding a slightly higher number, is to report the percentage of eligible voters who did vote. (In the U.S. only 92% of residents old enough to vote are eligible to vote; the ineligible 8% consists mainly of resident non-citizens, prison inmates, and convicted and released felons.) A third measure, yielding a still higher number, is to report the percentage of registered voters who did vote; quite a few eligible voters aren’t registered to vote, for reasons that I’ll discuss below.
All three measures yield the same conclusion: among affluent democracies (so-called OECD nations), the U.S. ranks at the bottom in voter turnout. To set the context, average turnouts of registered voters in elections in other democratic countries are 93% in Australia, where voting is compulsory by law; 89% in Belgium; and 58%–80% in most other European and East Asian democracies. Since Indonesia resumed free democratic elections after 1999, Indonesian voter turnout has fluctuated between 86% and 90%, while Italian turnout since 1948 has ranged up to 93%.
For comparison, U.S. turnout of eligible voters for our national elections averages only 60% for years of presidential elections, and 40% for years of midterm congressional elections. The highest turnout ever recorded in modern American history, for the 2008 presidential election, was only 62%, far below even the lowest recent turnout in Italy or in Indonesia. When registered American voters are asked why they don’t bother to vote, their commonest answers are that they don’t trust our government, they have no faith in the value of voting, or they aren’t interested in politics.
But there’s another reason why many Americans eligible to vote don’t do so: they can’t, because they are not registered to vote. That’s a distinctive feature of American democracy that calls for explanation. In many democracies, eligible citizens don’t have to do anything to “register” to vote: the government does it for them by generating a list of people automatically registered, from government lists of drivers’ licenses, taxpayers, residents, or other such databases. For instance, in Germany all Germans over the age of 18 automatically receive a card from the government notifying them that an election is coming up for which they are eligible to vote.
In the U.S. it’s more complicated. It’s not enough to be an American citizen eligible to vote by virtue of being over 18 years old, and not in prison or a convicted ex-felon: one still has to register to vote. The U.S. has had a long history of preventing whole groups of age-eligible citizens from registering. The largest such group was American women, who could not vote until 1919. Other groups, notably African-Americans, plus other minorities and immigrant groups, were prevented from registering by obstacles such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and “grandfather clauses.” (I.e., you can’t register to vote if your grandfather couldn’t vote.) Of course it wasn’t stated explicitly in the law that those measures were aimed to prevent African-Americans from voting. Nevertheless, everybody understood that the intended purpose and achieved effect of obstacles such as grandfather clauses were to make voter registration impossible for African-Americans.
In case you’re inclined to dismiss such obstacles as a vanished feature of the remote past, in the state of Florida in the year 2000 about 100,000 potential voters, the vast majority of them Democrats, were pruned off the list of registered voters. That pruning had an enormous effect on tipping the Florida 2000 presidential vote, hence the U.S. presidency, to George Bush over Al Gore—a much greater effect than did the subsequent well-publicized arguments over disqualifying mere hundreds of so-called chad ballots to which the election’s outcome is commonly misattributed. The basic flaw in our American system of voter registration is that, in Florida and many other states, our registered voter lists and election procedures are controlled by partisan procedures at state and local levels, not by non-partisan procedures at the national level. Partisan electoral officials often seek to make voting difficult for citizens likely to prefer the opposite political party.
The biggest broadening of U.S. voter registration procedures in modern American history was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed “literacy tests” for registration and gave the federal government oversight over voting districts with a previous pattern of obstructing registration. The result was that voter registration of African-Americans in southern U.S. states jumped from 31% to 73%, and the number of African-American officials elected nation-wide jumped from less than 500 to more than 10,000. Congress renewed that act nearly unanimously in 2006. But in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, overturned Congress’s 1965 formula for identifying districts to be subject to oversight, on the grounds that it had supposedly become unnecessary because of progress in registering African-American voters. The result was a rush by state legislatures to adopt new obstacles to voter registration, varying greatly among states. Until 2004, none of the 50 U.S. states required potential voters to show a government-is
sued photo ID in order to register or vote. Only two states had adopted such a requirement by 2008. But immediately upon the Supreme Court decision, 14 states adopted photo ID requirements (usually a driver’s license or passport) or other such restrictions, and most states now have or are contemplating them.
Just as the earlier grandfather clauses did not specifically mention African-Americans but were instead successfully designed to disenfranchise them, modern voting restriction methods have similar designs and successes. The percentage of potential voters who possess the required photo ID is considerably higher (depending on the age group, up to three times higher) for whites than for African-Americans or Latinos, and higher for rich people than for poor people. The reasons are banal ones with no direct relationship to deserving the right to vote: e.g., poorer people, and African-Americans in general, are more likely not to have a driver’s license because they haven’t paid a traffic fine. The state of Alabama closed its Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) offices (the offices that issue driver’s licenses) in counties with large African-American populations. In response to the resulting public outcry, Alabama re-opened those offices—but for just one day per month. The state of Texas maintained DMV offices in only one-third of its counties, forcing potential voters to travel up to 250 miles if they were determined to satisfy the photo ID requirement by getting a driver’s license.
Other obstacles to registering and voting also vary among states. Some states are “voter-friendly” in that they permit voters to register on Election Day itself, or they permit voters to mail their ballots rather than having to appear in person at the polls, or they keep election offices open on evenings and on weekends. Other states are “voter-unfriendly” by requiring that voters register within a short time window before Election Day, or by opening election offices only during work hours or weekdays. But poorer people (including our largest minorities) can’t afford to miss work and to wait in long lines to register or to vote.
All of these selective obstacles contribute to the fact that voter turnout is over 80% for Americans with incomes exceeding $150,000, but under 50% for Americans with incomes under $20,000. Those obstacles thereby influence the outcome not only of U.S. presidential elections, but also of many close congressional, state, and local election contests every year.
These limits on American voter participation, whether they result from voluntary choices by voters or else are imposed upon voters against their will, form the reverse side of the fundamental advantages of American democracy that I discussed in the previous chapter. Those advantages included: the opportunity for citizens to debate, evaluate, and choose any proposal; citizens knowing that they are being heard, and that they have peaceful outlets for expression; reduction of the risk of civil violence; incentives for compromise; and incentives to the government to invest in all citizens (ultimately, because they vote), rather than just in an elite fraction of citizens. Insofar as Americans choose not to vote, are ill-informed when they vote, or can’t vote at all, those are the advantages that we are losing.
No discussion of modern American democracy would be complete without mention of its most frequently criticized feature: the explosion in costs of election campaigns, due especially to the shift from inexpensive print-media advertising to expensive TV-based advertising. Campaigns have become predominantly funded by wealthy interests. There has also been an explosion in duration of campaigns, which now run virtually continuously from one election to the next. As a result, American politicians must devote most of their time (one retired senator friend of mine estimated, 80% of his time) to fund-raising and campaigning rather than to the task of governing; well-qualified citizens are discouraged from running for government office; and campaign information is reduced first to 30-second sound bites, then to short Twitter tweets. In contrast, the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas for election to the office of senator from Illinois in 1858 lasted up to six hours each. While of course only a fraction of Illinois voters physically attended the debates, they were widely disseminated in newspapers. No country approaches the U.S. in the expense and uninterrupted operation of our political campaigning. In contrast, in the United Kingdom election campaigning is restricted by law to a few weeks before an election, and the amount of money that can be spent for campaign purposes is also restricted by law.
Our next fundamental problem is inequality. Let’s consider what Americans think about American equality or inequality, how to measure it, and how the U.S. ranks in inequality and in socio-economic mobility compared to other major democracies. And, if inequality is high—so what? That is, if it turned out that many Americans really are poor, and doomed to remain poor, that would of course be very sad for them as individuals, but—is that also bad for rich Americans, and for the U.S. as a whole?
When asked about equality or inequality in the U.S., Americans are likely to respond that equality is a core American value, as stated already in the second sentence of our 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.…” Note, however, that the Declaration doesn’t state that all men (and now, also women) actually are equal or deserve to have equal incomes. Instead, the Declaration next merely says that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights. But even that modest assertion was a big deal by world standards in 1776, at a time when nobles and peasants and clergy in European countries had different legal rights and, if put on trial, would be tried before different courts. So, the Declaration of Independence really did enshrine legal equality as a core U.S. value, at least in theory. What’s the reality about economic inequality in the U.S.?
Economic inequality within a country can be measured in several different ways. One question concerns what quantity to compare among people: their raw unadjusted gross incomes? Or their adjusted incomes, after deductions such as for taxes, and after additions such as of Social Security payments and food stamps? Or their wealth or total assets? Individual variation among each of those quantities can in turn be measured in different ways, such as by the so-called Gini coefficient; by comparing the income of the country’s richest 1% with its poorest 1%; by computing the percentage of total national income belonging to the richest 1%; and by calculating the percentage of billionaires among the country’s population.
Let’s restrict our comparisons to major democracies, so that we’re not making an apples/oranges comparison of democracies against dictatorships such as Equatorial Guinea, where one man (the president) possesses most of the national income and wealth. Among major democracies, there are differences with respect to which country is calculated to have the greatest equality, depending on how one measures equality. However, as for which major democracy has the greatest inequality, all quantities compared and all measures yield the same conclusion: the major democracy with the greatest inequality is the U.S. That’s been true for a long time, and that inequality of ours is still increasing.
Some of those measures of rising American economic inequality have now become frequently quoted and widely familiar. For instance, the share of unadjusted national income earned by the richest 1% of Americans rose from less than 10% in the 1970’s to over 25% today. Inequality is rising even within the ranks of rich Americans themselves: the richest 1% of Americans have increased their incomes proportionately much more than the richest 5%; the richest 0.1% have done proportionately better than the richest 1%; and the three richest Americans (currently Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) have combined net worths currently equal to the combined net worths of the 130 million poorest Americans. The percentage of billionaires in our population is double that of the major democracies with the next highest percentage of billionaires (Canada and Germany), and seven times that of most other major democracies. The average income of an American CEO, which was already 40 times the income of the average worker in the same company in 1980, is now several hundred times that of the company’s average worker. Conversely, while the economic status of rich Ameri
cans exceeds that in other major democracies, the economic status of poor Americans is lower than that in other major democracies.
That growing skew between rich and poor Americans is due to a combination of American government policies and American attitudes. As for government policies, “redistribution” in the U.S.—i.e., government policies that in effect transfer money from richer to poorer people—is lower than in other major democracies. For instance, income tax rates, and social transfers and spending such as vouchers and subsidies for low-income people, are relatively low in the U.S. compared to most other major democracies. Part of the explanation is the belief, more widespread in the U.S. than in other countries, that poor people are poor because it’s their own fault, that they would become rich if only they would work harder, and that government support for low-income people (such as by food stamps) is rife with abuse and makes poor people unjustly affluent (so-called “welfare queens”). Another part of the explanation is the restrictions on voter registration and voting, and the campaign financing costs, that I discussed on earlier pages. Those issues give disproportionate political power to rich people, by making it easier for them than for poor people to register, vote, and influence politicians.
Closely related to this issue of economic inequality that I’ve just been discussing is the issue of socio-economic mobility: i.e., the likelihood that individual Americans can overcome economic inequality, and that poor Americans can become rich. Americans, more than citizens of other countries, believe that their country is a meritocracy, in which people achieve the rewards that their individual abilities permit them to achieve. This is symbolized by the distinctively American phrase “rags to riches”: we believe that a poor immigrant who arrives in rags can become rich through ability and hard work. Is this central belief of ours true?
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 35
