Is America Still a Land of Democracy and Social Equality?

America promises democracy and social equality as part of its commitment to a government by consent. Have these promises been kept?

One of America’s most important national commitments is government by consent. Many Americans no longer believe America is keeping that commitment.

In the last few pieces at Renew the Republic, I explained how America’s political parties inevitably collapse during unique historic crises that they’re unequipped to handle. Our era’s crisis, presently tearing us apart, is about the collapse of democratic legitimacy. Legitimacy is the invisible force holding societies together, creating their prosperity, stability, and dynamism. When it’s lost, societies collapse.

As the foundation of its claim to legitimacy, America makes three promises. Those promises are:

• Democracy

• Social Equality

• The American Dream

One reason America is facing so much national turmoil is because many Americans no longer believe those promises have been kept.

SELF-GOVERNMENT AND CONSENT

The first two promises of America, democracy and social equality, are part of America’s national commitment to government by consent. Modern democracies are nations of equal citizens engaged in a project of self-government. They have no rulers or ruling class, but self-governing citizens.

To maintain a government operating through consent, a democracy must keep two promises.

First, a government of consent must keep its promise of democracy. Democracy means more than just regular elections. It means ordinary citizens who can influence and control through government any source of power affecting their lives. If citizens don’t have this power, they’re not ruling their society. They’re subjects who select which members of the ruling class temporarily wear the crown.

Second, a government of consent must keep its promise of social equality. Social equality doesn’t mean everybody is equal economically or in social status. Some will have more wealth, influence, and private power than others. Social equality means citizens who have equal dignity, are equal before the law, and have equal democratic power. This requires two things. First, it requires state institutions operating with full transparency—if officials can manipulate the process or hide their actions, citizens can’t control officials and are therefore being ruled. Second, it requires citizens with the economic and social mobility to rise from the bottom to the top. Anything less means there’s a ruling class operating above them.

For most of its history, Americans had no reason to question that both of these things were true. There was no question Americans had the power to influence and control their nation through democracy. They could change policies, force the government to act, or make it refuse to act. Through public means, the could control any person or institution they didn’t trust. They could use their democratic power to dismantle the most powerful institutions like Standard Oil, controlled by the richest and most powerful men like John D. Rockefeller.

Americans also trusted that anyone could rise from the bottom of America to the top. To be sure, America had an elite class of the old Yankee aristocracy. At the same time, the Americans building great fortunes and joining their ranks often came from nothing, like Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Ford. In America, rough union guys with high school educations became powerful congressmen. Small town lawyers from nowhere like Lincoln became presidents.

Obviously, there were barriers and impediments. When exercising power, the people you’re affecting naturally push back. People with few resources and connections have a harder time climbing than those born into wealth and status. Race, gender, and national origin were wielded to create unfair barriers. Despite these natural impediments, however, nobody doubted “we the people” really meant we the people. Despite the many imperfections, Americans truly believed self-government was true.

Now, they’re not so sure.

If you listen to many Americans on both the left and right today, you hear some version of this complaint: democracy is no longer a reality and ordinary people no longer have a fair and equal chance to rise. On the right, you hear this complaint as “elites” controlling institutions as a ruling class. On the left, you hear it lodged at “corporations,” “oligarchs,” or “the billionaires” corrupting democracy and treating the people like serfs. Across the political spectrum, a lot of Americans apparently believe America’s promises of democracy and social equality are no longer being kept. They believe America has a ruling class.

I think they may have a point.

PROMISES NOT KEPT

You don’t have to believe in dark conspiracies to see people have good reason to believe America’s core promises aren’t being kept. We’re living in the midst of so much staggering change happening so fast it’s often hard to even recognize the world shifting underneath our feet.

Many of these changes affect the usual world of national policy. They involve issues like taxes, wages, and the economy. They involve social and moral revolutions and counter-revolutions. They involve national defense and national power. They involve the development and disruptions new technologies. They involve infrastructure and building things. Adjusting and adopting new policies to adapt to all this destabilizing change is critical to moving America forward. This is what most political leaders talk about.

Among ordinary citizens, however, you also hear another group of complaints. On both the right and the left, people complain they no longer feel like self-governing democratic citizens. Each individual complaint can be dismissed as insignificant, but when viewed from a loftier perspective and combined they begin to create an alarming picture.

In no particular order:

• More and more power and decision making has shifted to the national bureaucracy, while Congress has increasingly abdicated its responsibility to govern. This consolidated power outside democratically-elected institutions and into the hands of unelected decisionmakers without direct democratic accountability.

• Industry consolidation and the growth of vast multinationals created powerful organizations with extraordinary control over the daily lives of ordinary Americans. Levers of national politics have imperfect control over these powerful extranational institutions.

• The political divide between those at the top of institutions narrowed, creating an impression of one ruling clique with shared backgrounds, values, interests, and loyalties.

• For many issues in which the opinions shared among the political class diverge from large numbers of Americans, democratic levers no longer appear connected to policymaking. No matter how Americans vote, the policy never seems to change.

• Social media centralized control over the public square into a small number of private gatekeepers outside democratic accountability. Insiders, political parties, and government actors can quietly influence these gates behind the scenes to achieve through private channels what constitutional protections deny them directly through government.

• The decline of policymaking and the rise of moralistic and symbolic issues turned politics so ineffective that political leaders have abdicated their authority and responsibility to entities over which the public has limited influence.

• Powerful human resource bureaucracies give unaccountable private institutions increased control over what Americans can say and do, and how they must live their lives, without democratic accountability.

• The universities’ emergence as national credentialing institutions put upward mobility into the hands of private academic bureaucracies over which ordinary Americans have little control.

• New technology gave powerful institutions more information to identify, influence, and control ordinary people and to micromanage and control lives.

• Many critical national questions, from the development of artificial intelligence, to control of communication and social censorship, to implementing policies to ensure fairness and inclusion, are in the hands of private actors over which the public has limited control.

• Social media exposed ordinary people to the privileges those at the top enjoy, which were less visible to previous generations.

• Bureaucracies working in the name of national security play an increasing role in monitoring and controlling private citizens, with little public visibility and therefore direct democratic accountability.

• Corporate management’s transition to considering labor just another input, with little loyalty to longtime workers, made the economic lives of individual citizens more precarious, independent of national policy or the state of the national economy. Excellence and years of service rarely prevent firing based on spreadsheets.

• Nationalizing and internationalizing of industries and institutions creates more winner-take-all markets with a few big winners and little middle class.

• The gap between top earners and ordinary workers widened dramatically, and often appears to have little relation to performance.

Each event alone is easy enough to dismiss. Taken together, along with more, it’s reasonable to see why many Americans are losing faith in democracy. They draw a picture of an America in which ordinary citizens no longer control their lives through self-government. They now have rulers.

We often hear Americans have lost trust in America’s institutions and government, as polls agree. Maybe that’s a wrong way to interpret it. When people say they no longer trust leaders and institutions, perhaps they’re not saying they feel their leaders are misruling them. They’re saying they’re outraged at feeling ruled.

It’s not shocking that many political leaders, activists, and would-be-reformers refuse to even consider that America might be failing to honor its most important promises—they’re among the small group that feels like they get to rule. They hope to get America back on track by ruling wiser—better policies, smart reforms, and wiser leaders creating more prosperity and strength. These things will be required, but they’re not enough alone. America must also keep its promises of democracy and social equality to maintain its commitment to a government by consent, because that’s the foundation of America’s legitimacy. If America fails to keep these promises, no matter how much peace, prosperity, and strength it offers the people, it will never be enough to stop the republic from deterioration and ultimate collapse.

The only fix to failing to keep the promises necessary to maintain a state’s legitimacy is to start keeping those promises in full.

In the next article we’ll talk about the failure of America’s final promise: The American Dream.

Do you think America is keeping its promises of democracy and social equality? Join the community in the comments.