Historical Review: American Democracy

Historical review: American democracy

Introduction.

In the context of the enormous inequality that afflicts the United States, where less than one percent of the population has as much wealth as 90 percent below, the intellectual Noam Chomsky put himself in the task of explaining the economic disparity of the country morepowerful in the world. Noam Chomsky’s new documentary seems to be taken from the Democratic Precondidate campaign to the American presidency Bernie Sanders. 

Like the Vermont senator, the American intellectual believes that the economic inequality of his country is due to a series of problems that have questioned the same possibility of a functional democracy: the excessive relevance of money in politics, des regularizationof financial institutions, the manipulation of electoral campaigns.

Developing.

In the great depression of the thirties, I am age to remember, most of my family lost their job, the situation was serious, subjectively worse than today, but there was hope that things were going to improve, today that hope does notexists. For Chomsky, the American dream has died. Or if he has not died, at least he is in a deep lethargy. The dream, mostly symbolic, was also real, and its corners, send their children to a good university or school.

Today, on the other hand, in the United States just a tenth of one percent controls almost all the wealth of the country. A situation that is not only extremely unfair, says the intellectual, but corrodes the basis of the democratic system and has highly negative effects for society.

In a functional democracy, he explains, public opinion influences policies. But the excessive concentration of wealth leads to the excessive concentration of power, which in turn is used to favor the few above. A vicious cycle.

According to the academic, throughout American history there has been a struggle between those who press from below for better conditions and who, from above, exercise their power to reduce that impulse. James Madison, the architect of the American Constitution, ensured that power was in the hands of few. How? Granting the majority of the control to the legislative branch, to the Senate, which at that time was not chosen by the people but by the segment of the wealthy population. Madison feared that if the poor could choose their rulers, then they would take everything from the rich. And that would be unfair.

In his policy, Aristotle described that same fight. His proposal, however, was the opposite. Instead of taking power to the many to protect the opulence of the few, states must invest in a kind of welfare state. Its logic: the best way to avoid a revolution is reducing inequality. And according to Chomsky, among the possibility of reducing democracy or inequality, US rulers opted from the beginning for the first option.

Conclusions.

For him, after the democratic advances of the sixties, when the civil rights of minorities and women came into force, that selfish mentality charged worrying dimensions. And the reaction was resounding. In the seventies both the right and the left sought how to reduce the democratic advances of the previous decade. 

The right with the Powell Memorandum, in which the lawyer and future judge of the Supreme Court Lewis Powell called on corporations to find ways to repress the progress of the sixties. From that memorandum they were born powerful institutions such as The Heritage Foundation, The Manhattan Institute, among others, who sought to influence the public to reject the growing power of the government in their lives.