The Great Democracy

by Ganesh Sitaraman

  7. Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012); Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” 12 American Political Science Review 564 (2014); Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2d ed. 2016); Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba & Henry E. Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (2012); Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (2011).

  8. Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto 235 (2019); Daniel Denvir, “Hillary Clinton’s Cynical Race Appeals: The Revenge of Neoliberal Identity Politics,” Salon, Feb. 19, 2016.

  9. On Libya, see Alan J. Kuperman, “Obama’s Libya Debacle,” Foreign Affairs (Mar./Apr. 2015).

  10. Kurt M. Campbell & Ely Ratner, “The China Reckoning,” Foreign Affairs (Mar./Apr. 2018), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-02-13/china-reckoning; Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents.

  11. Ryan Lizza, “Inside the Crisis,” New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009; Catharine Richert, “Stewart Claims that the Stimulus Bill Is One-Third Tax Cuts,” PolitiFact, Feb. 10, 2010, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/10/jon-stewart/stewart-claims-stimulus-bill-one-third-tax-cuts/; Larry Elliott, “Alistair Darling: We Will Cut Deeper Than Margaret Thatcher,” Guardian, Mar. 25, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher.

  12. Alexander Bolton, “Lieberman to Vote against Public Option,” Hill, Oct. 27, 2019; Chris Hayes, “The Perriello Way,” Nation, Nov. 22, 2010, https://www.thenation.com/article/perriello-way/.

  13. Republican Party Platform (2012).

  14. For a description and critique of the technocratic approach in Dodd-Frank, see K. Sabeel Rahman, Democracy against Domination (2017); Ganesh Sitaraman, “Unbundling Too Big to Fail,” Center for American Progress, July 2014.

  15. Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness 1–3, 5 (2008); Maya Shankar, “Designing Federal Programs with the American People in Mind,” White House, Sept. 15, 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/09/15/designing-federal-programs-american-people-mind; U.K. Behavioural Insights Team, http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/.

  16. Thaler & Sunstein, Nudge, at 252–253; Ryan Bubb & Richard H. Pildes, “How Behavioral Economics Trims Its Sails and Why,” 127 Harvard Law Review 1593 (2014).

  17. Cazilia Loibl, Lauren Eden Jones, Emily Haisley & George Loewenstein, “Testing Strategies to Increase Saving and Retention in Individual Development Account Programs,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2735625.

  18. Bubb & Pildes, “How Behavioral Economics Trims Its Sails,” at 1610, 1631, 1635.

  19. Eduardo Porter, “Nudges Aren’t Enough for Problems Like Retirement Savings,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/business/economy/nudges-arent-enough-to-solve-societys-problems.html?_r=0.

  20. Simon Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons 164, 78, 51, 88 (2006); Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years 306 (1995).

  21. William A. Niskanen, Reaganomics, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/Reaganomics.html; Michael Oppenheimer, “How the IPCC Got Started,” EDF, Nov. 1, 2007, http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2007/11/01/ipcc_beginnings/.

  22. Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons, at 164, 162.

  23. Randall Rothenberg, The Neoliberals 27–28 (1984).

  CHAPTER 4: AFTER NEOLIBERALISM

  1. Brink Lindsey & Steven M. Teles, The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality (2017).

  2. Will Wilkinson, “For Trump and the G.O.P., the Welfare State Shouldn’t Be the Enemy,” New York Times, May 27, 2017; Samuel Hammond, “The Free-Market Welfare State: Preserving Dynamism in a Volatile World,’ Niskanen Center, May 2018.

  3. Alex Tabarrok, “Federal Regulation Is Not the Cause of Declining Dynamism,” Marginal Revolution, Feb. 5, 2018, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/federal-regulation-not-cause-declining-dynamism.html; Rachel Cohen, “The Libertarian Who Accidentally Helped Make the Case for Regulation,” Washington Monthly, Apr./May/June 2018, https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2018/null-hypothesis/.

  4. Brink Lindsey, “Liberaltarians,” New Republic, Dec. 10, 2006; Jonathan Chait, “Kiss Me, Cato,” New Republic, Dec. 24, 2006; Steven Teles, “How to Get to Liberaltarianism from the Left,” Niskanen Center, June 12, 2017, https://niskanencenter.org/blog/get-liberaltarianism-left/.

  5. Writings on a universal basic income are now voluminous but include the following: Andy Stern with Lee Kravitz, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (2016); Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (2018). A more academic account is Philippe Van Parijs & Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (2017). A slightly different take, proposing ultimately an increase to the Earned Income Tax Credit, is Chris Hughes, Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn (2018).

  6. The Federal Poverty Level in 2018 in the United States, for an individual, was $12,140. Healthcare.gov, “Federal Poverty Level,” https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-fpl/; Luke Martinelli, “Assessing the Case for a Universal Basic Income in the UK, Institute for Policy Research, IPR Policy Brief, Sept. 2017, http://www.bath.ac.uk/publications/assessing-the-case-for-a-universal-basic-income-in-the-uk/attachments/basic_income_policy_brief.pdf; Daniel Zamora, “The Case against a Basic Income,” Jacobin, Dec. 28, 2017 (trans. Jeff Bate Boerop); Joi Ito, “The Paradox of Universal Basic Income,” Wired, Mar. 29, 2018.

  7. Jacob S. Hacker, “The Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class Democracy,” Policy Network (2011).

  8. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019).

  9. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, at 394.

  10. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (2016).

  11. Vishakha Darbha, “6 Times Donald Trump Promised Not to Cut Medicare,” Mother Jones, Dec. 8, 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/donald-trump-paul-ryan-medicare-medicaid/; Dylan Scott, “Trump’s Abandoned Promise to Bring Down Drug Prices, Explained,” Vox, Feb. 2, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/30/16896434/trump-drug-prices-year-one; Heather Long, “Trump Has Done a Big Flip-Flop on Wall Street,” CNN Business, Apr. 26, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/26/investing/donald-trump-wall-street/index.html.

  12. Ryan Grim, “Steve Bannon Pushing for 44 Percent Marginal Tax Rate on the Very Rich,” Intercept, July 26, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/steve-bannon-pushing-for-44-percent-marginal-tax-rate-on-the-very-rich/; Louis Nelson, “Steve Bannon Hails Trump’s ‘Economic Nationalist’ Agenda,” Politico, Nov. 18, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/steve-bannon-trump-hollywood-reporter-interview-231624; Ryan Grim, “Steve Bannon Wants Facebook and Google Regulated Like Utilities,” Intercept, July 27, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/steve-bannon-wants-facebook-and-google-regulated-like-utilities/; Robert Kuttner, “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant,” American Prospect, Aug. 16, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant.

  13. Steven Bannon, Panel at Conservative Political Action Conference, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPFpTergAGQ.

  14. Lee Drutman, “Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond: Tensions between and within the Two Parties,” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, June 2017, https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publications/2016-elections/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond; Larry M. Bartels, “Partisanship in the Trump Era,” at 2, Vanderbilt Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Feb. 7, 2018, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/includes/Workingpaper2_2108.pdf.

  15.
Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (2018); Cass R. Sunstein, ed., Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (2018); Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017).

  16. On norms, see Steven Levitsky & Daniel Zibaltt, Why Democracies Die (2018); on illiberal democracy, see Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy (2018) and Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (2003). This not to say that these authors ignore economic issues entirely. Mounk, for example, highlights economic breakdowns in some detail. But the emphasis is generally elsewhere. For a critique along these lines, see Jedediah Purdy, “Normcore,” Dissent, Summer 2018, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/normcore-trump-resistance-books-crisis-of-democracy.

  17. Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (2011).

  18. See, e.g., Matthew Simonton, Classical Greek Oligarchy (2017).

  19. Brian D. Taylor, The Code of Putinism 52–53, 71 (2018).

  20. Taylor, Code of Putinism, at 104, 109, 117, 90, 102 (2018).

  21. Paul Lendvai, Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman 94, 85, 99–103, 129–131 (2017); Jan-Werner Müller, “Homo Orbánicus,” New York Review of Books, Apr. 5, 2018.

  22. Lendvai, Orbán, at 89, 37, 195, 29; Jan-Werner Jan-Werner Müller, “Homo Orbánicus.”

  23. Lendvai, Orbán, at 92, 138, 181, 151; Müller, “Homo Orbánicus”; Neil Buckley & Andrew Byrne, “Viktor Orban’s Oligarchs: A New Elite Emerges in Hungary,” Financial Times, Dec. 20, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/ecf6fb4e-d900-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482.

  24. Müller, “Homo Orbánicus.”

  25. Joshua Kurlantzick, State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism Is Transforming the World (2016); Minxin Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay 7 (2016).

  26. Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism, at 16–17, 24, 20–31.

  27. Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism 1–3; David Barboza, “Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html.

  28. Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power 22 (2017); Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State 42, 38 (2018); Carl Minzner, End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise 30 (2018). Minzner also calls China’s approach populist nationalism and compares it to Venezuela, Russia, Turkey, and Trump; Minzner, End of an Era, at 167.

  29. Nicholas Kulish, Caitlin Dickerson & Ron Nixon, “Immigration Agents Discover New Freedom to Deport under Trump,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 2017; Glenn Thrush, “New Outcry as Trump Rebukes Charlottesville Racists 2 Days Later,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2017; Michael D. Shear & Maggie Haberman, “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames ‘Both Sides,’” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2017.

  30. Economic Policy Institute, “How Would Repealing the Affordable Care Act Affect Health Care and Jobs in Your State,” https://www.epi.org/aca-obamacare-repeal-impact/; Dylan Scott, “CBO: 13 Million More Uninsured if You Repeal Obamacare’s Individual Mandate,” Vox, Nov. 8, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/8/16623154/cbo-obamacare-individual-mandate-new-baseline.

  31. Heather Long, “The Final GOP Tax Bill Is Complete. Here’s What Is in It,” Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/15/the-final-gop-tax-bill-is-complete-heres-what-is-in-it/?utm_term=.4eb578027319.

  32. Barry Meier & Danielle Ivory, “Under Trump, Worker Protections Are Viewed with New Skepticism,” New York Times, June 5, 2017; James Hamblin, “A Burdensome Regulation Screening Truck Drivers for a Sleep Disorder,” Atlantic, Aug. 8, 2007; Shannon van Sant, “Firm Prepares to Mine Land Previously Protected as a National Monument,” NPR, June 21, 2018; Julia Horowitz, “Trump Kills Rule that Made It Easier for People to Sue Banks,” CNN Money, Nov. 1, 2017; Derek Kravitz, Al Shaw & Isaac Arnsdorf, “What We Found in Trump’s Drained Swamp: Hundreds of Ex-Lobbyists and D.C. Insiders,” ProPublica, Mar. 7, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/what-we-found-in-trump-administration-drained-swamp-hundreds-of-ex-lobbyists-and-washington-dc-insiders.

  33. Rebecca Ballhaus, “Admission to President’s Fundraiser Tonight at Trump International Hotel Won’t Come Cheap,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/campaign-wire-2018-midterms/card/1536780821; Robert Frank, “Mar-a-Lago Membership Fee Doubles to $200,000,” CNBC, Jan. 25, 2017; Ali Dukakis, “Watchdog Group Finds More Spending at Trump Properties by Foreign Governments, Political Groups,” ABC News, June 27, 2018; Jennifer Epstein, “Mar-a-Lago on $1 Million a Day: Taxpayer Costs for Trump Trips,” Bloomberg, Feb. 5, 2019.

  34. Dylan Scott, “North Carolina Elections Board Orders New House Election after Ballot Tampering Scandal,” Vox, Feb. 21, 2019; Michael Tackett & Michael Wines, “Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2018; Dara Lind, “The Citizenship Question on the 2020 Census, Explained,” Vox, Mar. 28, 2018; https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/28/17168048/census-citizenship-2020-immigrants-count-trump-lawsuit.

  35. Angela Caputo, Geoff Hing & Johnny Kauffman, “They Didn’t Vote… Now They Can’t,” APMReports, Oct. 19, 2018, https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/10/19/georgia-voter-purge; Richard L. Hasen, “Brian Kemp Just Engaged in a Last-Minute Act of Banana-Republic Level Voter Manipulation in Georgia,” Slate, Nov. 4, 2018. On Orbán, see David Leonhardt, “‘An Appalling Abuse of Power,’” New York Times, Nov. 5, 2018; Roxana Hegeman, “New Voters Get Notices Listing Wrong Dodge City Polling Site,” Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2018; David Leonhardt, “The Corporate Donors Behind a Republican Power Grab,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2018.

  36. Robert Kuttner & Hildy Zenger, “Saving the Free Press from Private Equity,” American Prospect, Dec. 27, 2017; http://prospect.org/article/saving-free-press-private-equity.

  37. Jacey Fortin & Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite from the Same Script,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 2018; Alvin Chang, “Sinclair’s Takeover of Local News, in One Striking Map,” Vox, Apr. 6, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/4/6/17202824/sinclair-tribune-map.

  38. Ezra Klein, “The Doom Loop of Oligarchy,” Vox, Apr. 11, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/4/11/5581272/doom-loop-oligarchy.

  39. Kurlantzick, State Capitalism, at 20, 74; see also Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government (2013); Roberto Stefan Foa & Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” 27 Journal of Democracy 5, 7, 14 (July 2016), https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26Mounk-27-3.pdf.

  CHAPTER 5: TOWARD A GREAT DEMOCRACY

  1. See Federalist No. 10 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter, ed., 1999) (“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place”); Federalist No. 14 (James Madison) (“In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents”).

  2. Associated Press, “Kim Jong-Un ‘Elected’ with 100% of the Vote,” USA Today, Mar. 10, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/10/nkorea-election/6247491/.

  3. Aziz Huq & Tom Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” 65 UCLA Law Review 78 (2018); Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018). Other works in this general genre include the following: David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (2018); Alasdair Roberts, Four Crises of American Democracy: Representation, Mastery, Discipline, Anticipation (2016) (focusing on “anticipation,” including climate change, as the main crisis of today). For an excellent typology of the ways norms break down, see Joshua Chafetz & David E. Pozen, “How Constitutional Norms Break Down,” 65 UCLA Law Review 1430 (2018).

  4. Barak D. Richman, Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange (2017); Lisa Bernstein, “Opting Out of the Legal System: Extralegal Contractual Relations in the Diamond
Industry,” 21 Journal of Legal Studies 115 (1992).

  5. Andrew Sullivan, “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic,” New York Magazine, May 1, 2016.

  6. A terrific historical account of the expansion of suffrage is Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000). An account that places surprisingly little attention on social and economic factors, given its title, is Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (1984). Others who expand beyond electoral and participatory decisions focus on institutions. See, e.g., Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012). There have been some notable exceptions. Francis Fukuyama is attentive to culture, religion, and other social factors in addition to political and economic factors in The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014).

  7. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 148 (Swallow Press, 1954).

  8. James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought 4 (2016).

  9. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (2017); Theodore Roosevelt, “Two Noteworthy Books on Democracy,” Outlook, Nov. 18, 1914, at 650–651.

  10. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation 60–143 (1967) (distinguishing between representation as “standing for” and “acting for”). For other typologies, see Philip Pettit, “Varieties of Public Representation,” in Political Representation 61, 65 (Ian Shapiro et al. eds., 2009) (arguing that representation can be indicative, directed, and interpretive); Monica Brito Vieira & David Runciman, Representation x (2008) (defining three types of representation: where representatives are told what to do, decide what to do, or copy what to do); Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 13 European Journal of Philosophy 155, 156–157, 168–169, 172–174 (2005) (classifying representation as juridical, theatrical, and pictorial). John Adams, Letter to John Penn, Jan. 1776, in IV The Works of John Adams 203, 205 (Charles Francis Adams, ed., 1851).