Democracy, Anocracy or Plutocracy?

  

Democracy is a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation ("direct democracy"), or to choose governing officials to do so ("representative democracy").

Anocracy or semidemocracy is a form of government that is loosely defined as part democracy and part dictatorship, or as a "regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features." Another definition classifies anocracy as "a regime that permits some means of participation through opposition group behavior but that has incomplete development of mechanisms to redress grievances."

Plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. 

Wikipedia.

What is the political form that defines the United States as it is today? Most Americans would still rely on the assumption that we are a democracy, more specifically a representative democracy. But that description has never been accurate. Under a pure representative democracy, all citizens would have equal protection under the law and have equal voting power. Yet, not only are we moving farther away from these standards as gerrymandering and voter exclusion/marginalization/suppression become a revised new normal, but our system of federal elections for example, has elected five US Presidents (recently George W Bush and Donald J Trump) who lost the popular vote. 

On top of that, the powerful US Senate, where those elected serve six-year terms, allocates two Senators from each state regardless of population. Wyoming, with under 600 thousand residents, has the same two-Senator representation as does California, with 40 million. When you combine the above political distortions, a resident of a rural-dominated state, with a small population, has almost double the voting power of an urban-dominated state with a vastly greater population. Thus, 30% of the United States elects 50% of our Senate. It’s little wonder that this rural values skew, not reflective of majority opinions, elevates religious issues, gun ownership and even outdated cultural prerogatives as dominating political vectors.

The predominant view of our democratic allies – mirrored in the UK’s prestigious journal, The Economist’s view of the United States as a “flawed democracy” (literally a “hybrid regime”) that is not a truly representative – is that the United States is not a true democracy. That “hybrid” description, amplified by the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, steers this view in the direction of “anocracy,” a word recently added to the global vocabulary to reflect a growing movement of elected autocrats or de facto autocrats. Indeed, in 2022, the United States, which was already slipping year-to-year, fell to 19th measured by Freedom House’s annual Human Freedom Index.

But we have also moved farther to an exclusionary form of governance by giving the rich vastly greater pollical clout (individuals and business entities now imbued with “individual rights”) under a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United vs FEC, which legitimized uncapped contributions in support of candidates and political issues that would be crimes in many other democracies. Effectively, rich and highly biased contributors would flash their extensive wealth at an extreme position via a dedicated SuperPac campaign, and early-stage candidates, who in pre-2010 were never been able to raise much funding in their nascent political careers, would eagerly embrace that extremist view to turn that campaign spigot in their direction: A mega-contributor to our heavily polarized nation and our gridlocked, no-more-compromises, Congress.

Fundamentally, even our system of taxation places those with asset-based wealth at a huge material advantage over those who earn a living. Except at pivotal transitions (asset sale or testamentary transfer, for example) and real estate-based property tax, we do not tax wealth. We tax income. Hence, many billionaires face lower tax rates than the lowest wage-earners in their business operations. The federal tax code is so slanted in favor of asset wealth that over 50 of our most successful corporations pay no tax at all. The rich can borrow against their wealth and deduct the interest, roll over that debt every few years, and live very well without paying taxes on those cash infusions.

Recent case in point, from a man who is likely to become the world’s first trillionaire: Elon Musk’s successful flirtation with acquiring Twitter, which effectively allowed the activist investor to overcome that company’s poison pill and assure that his voice will always be widely heard without fear of being removed from that platform. He did it without having to create a taxable transaction by selling Tesla stock. Instead, according to the April 22nd LA Times/AP, he set up $46.5 billion credit base (from which he could borrow – the final price: $44B) from Morgan Stanley and other banks, partly secured by his Tesla stake (and other equity assets), to implement that takeover. Musk used his wealth to pay for his whim to wield more power while, once again, sidestepping the tax man. With Citizen’s United supporting rich corporate speech, Twitter finally succumbed to “cold hard cash” to become a rich man’s mouthpiece disguised as “free speech.” Taxpayers were screwed again.

We have greater income inequality in the United States than ever before. Our political system gives those with money the campaign power to keep laws that favor not taxing wealth while taxing earnings. Guess who wins there? The pandemic allowed big companies to cut staffing that would never been possible during normal times, replace workers with artificial intelligence-driven automation, which, along with the 2017 corporate tax cut (creating a massive deficit that impacts all Americans), exploded their values. 

As reported by the April 22nd Associated Press and Bloomberg, the Brookings Institution’s recent release of survey information showed “Shareholder gains have outpaced those of workers by 50 to 1 during the pandemic, researchers say… Investors in 22 companies gained $1.5 trillion during the pandemic. Workers gained $27 billion… 

“The report — which focused on 22 industry leaders, including Amazon.com Inc. and McDonald’s Corp. — found that stockholders added some $1.5 trillion in wealth from January 2020 to October 2021. The companies spent about $27 billion on additional pay and bonuses, and five times that amount on dividends and stock buybacks, the Washington think tank said.” The tight job market and the widened income gap between workers and owners/most senior managers are the biggest impetus to increasing efforts to unionize the American labor force, as the notable success at a growing number of Starbucks and Amazon facilities does attest.

So, what is the answer to “What is the political form that defines the United States as it is today?” It hovers well within the definitions of an anocracy and a plutocracy. It clearly is not, however, a representative democracy under any meaningful analysis, moving farther away from that definition every day.

I’m Peter Dekom, and America is no longer the land of opportunity and upward mobility; it has become instead the land of opportunists.