Plutocrats Against Democracy
It’s
always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn’t
their intention. So we should be grateful to Leung Chun-ying, the
Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, for blurting out the real reason
pro-democracy demonstrators can’t get what they want: With open voting,
“You would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less
than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics
and policies” — policies, presumably, that would make the rich less rich
and provide more aid to those with lower incomes.
So
Mr. Leung is worried about the 50 percent of Hong Kong’s population
that, he believes, would vote for bad policies because they don’t make
enough money. This may sound like the 47 percent of Americans who Mitt
Romney said would vote against him because they don’t pay income taxes
and, therefore, don’t take responsibility for themselves, or the 60
percent that Representative Paul Ryan argued pose a danger because they
are “takers,” getting more from the government than they pay in. Indeed,
these are all basically the same thing.
For
the political right has always been uncomfortable with democracy. No
matter how well conservatives do in elections, no matter how thoroughly
free-market ideology dominates discourse, there is always an
undercurrent of fear that the great unwashed will vote in left-wingers
who will tax the rich, hand out largess to the poor, and destroy the
economy.
In
fact, the very success of the conservative agenda only intensifies this
fear. Many on the right — and I’m not just talking about people
listening to Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about members of the political
elite — live, at least part of the time, in an alternative universe in
which America has spent the past few decades marching rapidly down the
road to serfdom. Never mind the new Gilded Age that tax cuts and
financial deregulation have created; they’re reading books with titles
like “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic,” asserting
that the big problem we have is runaway redistribution.
This
is a fantasy. Still, is there anything to fears that economic populism
will lead to economic disaster? Not really. Lower-income voters are much
more supportive than the wealthy toward policies that benefit people
like them, and they generally support higher taxes at the top. But if
you worry that low-income voters will run wild, that they’ll greedily
grab everything and tax job creators into oblivion, history says that
you’re wrong. All advanced nations have had substantial welfare states
since the 1940s — welfare states that, inevitably, have stronger support
among their poorer citizens.
But you don’t, in fact, see countries
descending into tax-and-spend death spirals — and no, that’s not what
ails Europe.
Still,
while the “kind of politics and policies” that responds to the bottom
half of the income distribution won’t destroy the economy, it does tend
to crimp the incomes and wealth of the 1 percent, at least a bit; the
top 0.1 percent is paying quite a lot more in taxes right now than it
would have if Mr. Romney had won. So what’s a plutocrat to do?
One
answer is propaganda: tell voters, often and loudly, that taxing the
rich and helping the poor will cause economic disaster, while cutting
taxes on “job creators” will create prosperity for all. There’s a reason
conservative faith in the magic of tax cuts persists no matter how many
times such prophecies fail (as is happening right now in Kansas):
There’s a lavishly funded industry of think tanks and media
organizations dedicated to promoting and preserving that faith.
Another
answer, with a long tradition in the United States, is to make the most
of racial and ethnic divisions — government aid just goes to Those
People, don’t you know. And besides, liberals are snooty elitists who
hate America.
A
third answer is to make sure government programs fail, or never come
into existence, so that voters never learn that things could be
different.
But
these strategies for protecting plutocrats from the mob are indirect
and imperfect. The obvious answer is Mr. Leung’s: Don’t let the bottom
half, or maybe even the bottom 90 percent, vote.
And
now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the
alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so
much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even
the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say
outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least
not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the
political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.
The
truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at
root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means
clear which side will win.
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