Always has been."
[WS:] I think it is an oversimplification that obscures more than it reveals. The voice of the rich weighs more than that of the poor in most countries, not just the US. A more peculiar (but certainly not unique) feature of the US is the wekaness of its political central nervous system, which makes the rich look as if they had more power.
Most European democracies developed from monarchies, whose legacy was a relatively strong central governing authority posing an effective counterweight to aristocracy or business interest. The US lacked monarchic traditions and by implication a central authority. Its political institutions were created by plantation owners and businessmen whose overarching objective was to avoid replicating a European monarchic system, and instead creating a 'democracy' by the 18th century standards.
The effect was what someone (deTocqueville?) described as a "country of political parties and courts" i.e a country with a weak central authority. The only departure form that model was the outcome of the civl war that created a standing army - which significantly increased the power of the central (federal) government albeit limiting the field of its operations to foreign affairs. Domestically, the US has been and still is a country of "political parties and courts."
That system of political parties and courts is far more conducive to voicing interest of the wealthy than a system with a strong central government - which creates an impression of plutocracy. But the key point is not the power of the weallthy per se, which is often divided or hijacked by individual capitalists (as opposed to the capitalist class as a whole) but the unsually strong power of political parties and courts (both responsive to special interest groups) vis a vis that of the central government.
It is that absence of a strong central government that makes the US look is if it did not have any public policy but rather partisan politicking responsive to private party interest. In a way, it is like a compuer with terabytes of memory and disk space, super video graphic accelerators, and an 8086 CPU taken out of an old XT machine.
Wojtek
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 23, 2009, at 11:23 AM, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
>
> The closer democracy got to Ralph, the less he liked it.
>>
>
>
> Face it. The US political system is plutocracy, not democracy. Always
> has been. Ralph Nader knows that better than anyone, having consistently
> experienced being denied such elementary democratic rights as ballot access
> and participation in national debate. Nobody in national political life is
> close to his equal as an advocate for democracy and opponent of corporate
> plutocracy.
>
> His new book, as described, seems like a clever illustration of the program
> of a real democratic movement. In the absence of such a movement--thanks to
> all the liberals, labor skates, and conformist leftists who gave us (most
> recently) Clinton, Obama, et. al., as lesser evils to even more stupid
> plutocrats--Ralph presents as historical fiction an illustration of his
> program as realized by the only people with the authority to do so, a
> fictional group of enlightened plutocrats doing what, in real life, they had
> obviously no desire to do. A new way to make his consistent point, so
> difficult for Dumbocratic leftists to grasp, the the US is a liberal
> plutocracy, not a democracy.
>
> Shane Mage
>
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
>> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
>> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>>
>> Herakleitos of Ephesos
>>
>
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>