The Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy’s mission to fight inequality through citizen action depends on America’s democracy. American citizens still get to choose most of their leaders and lawmakers. This fact endows citizens with great influence, and in ACED’s opinion significant responsibilities, as well.
Democracy means government by the people. Thus, it also means people are political actors. While the United States is not a pure democracy, Americans’ ability to choose representatives every 2, 4, and 6 years at the Federal level certainly makes our country very democratic. If we take the notion that we have a democracy seriously, it follows that citizens bear some responsibility for the overall course American policies have taken, even though citizens-at-large do not make specific policy decisions.
ACED has discussed the role voters play in moving political parties along a left-to-right spectrum before, but that is not the focus here. Here, we want to highlight some of the results of status quo political behavior, by which ACED means the American voter’s almost unwavering fidelity to the two major parties even as they have been co-opted by elite interests. With the following facts in mind, people can make more fully informed decisions in future elections.
1. The United States is becoming a society for the rich – ACED has already written a fair amount on this. Social inequality, itself, is probably unjust but perhaps necessary. That said, the level of inequality in the United States is grotesque. As a result of it, Americans with low incomes and little means are increasingly denied even the opportunity to participate and succeed in our society. Today, for example, Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times reported that the gap in education between affluent and low-income individuals is steadily growing. One study found that “the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s,” (emphasis added). Alarmingly, the studies Tavernise cites were completed before the Great Recession. Based on past data, researchers suspect that the economic downturn has likely exacerbated the problem.
With less education, it is extremely difficult to compete and succeed in our society. What this means is lower class people often don’t even get the chance to succeed because they are poor. No wonder social mobility in the United States is so low, with the “disturbing” likelihood that it will only get worse.
2. America’s prisons are full, and full of poor people – The United States has more people incarcerated and under related surveillance than any country in the world. The total number has risen sharply over recent decades. Indeed, “the accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed,” Adam Gopnik wrote in January. He continued:
“In 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.” (emphasis added).
And who is filling America’s prisons? According to Prison Legal News, mostly poor people. It found that “[m]ost prisoners report incomes of less than $8,000 a year in the year prior to coming to prison,” and “were unemployed at the time of their arrest.” Also, african-american males are substantially more likely to be incarcerated than any other group.
America’s prisons pose a serious a moral problem. Not only does our justice system discriminate based on income and race in sending people to prison, but the prisons themselves are horrible, inhumane places to be alive. More from Gopnik:
“Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected.” (emphasis added).
3. Many poor women do not have access to abortion clinics and/or the money to pay for an abortion – According to the National Abortion Federation, 88% of counties in the United States have no abortion provider. Other barriers include: “shortage of trained abortion providers; state laws that make getting an abortion more complicated than is medically necessary; continued threats of violence and harassment at abortion clinics; state and federal Medicaid restrictions; and fewer hospitals providing abortion services.” Moreover, the procedure can be very costly, especially for people with limited means. It is therefore not surprising that for “women who are struggling to make ends meet and who do not have insurance that covers abortion, the legal right to have an abortion does not guarantee that they will have access to it.”
4. The United States is responsible for countless civilian deaths – Countless civilians have died as a result of U.S. foreign policy under the last two presidents. An estimated 1 million civilians were killed in the Iraq war, and more continue to be killed by drone attacks and other actions.
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Those few examples help make up the reality of the United States. Even though politicians and many pundits rarely mention those facts, they are part of the political reality, too. As political actors, then, citizens have contributed to these realities. In other words, we are responsible for them to some degree. There are good reasons to continue supporting one of the two major parties and the interests they serve, but such a choice comes at a cost – and often to people other than the voter. It is difficult to account for all of the consequences of a political choice especially when they do not affect you. The above examples are meant to highlight the people who pay most dearly for some of America’s political choices so citizens can weigh those costs in the future.
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