Democratic governance, democratic politics, and democratic political institutions are not set in stone. Indeed, they are all vulnerable to ongoing processes of cooperation, competition, and conflict, as well as to direct efforts aimed at compromising democratic performance. We should not be surprised or even necessarily alarmed by this fact. Hence students of American politics, as well as the entire body politic, must necessarily engage in an ongoing search for the sources of such problems, as well as for remedies and insurance against their recurrence.
Such a search is ably undertaken in the comprehensive work of Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens in their book Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It (2020). Page and Gilens present a withering critique of the failures of modern democratic politics. They locate several sources of distortion in current American politics, but one source looms above all others: wealth inequality. In particular, they point toward the extreme economic inequality present in the contemporary United States and its troubling implications for the survival of a robust democracy. Their effort goes beyond mere critique, however. Indeed, a substantial portion of their book proposes a concrete blueprint for enhancing instruments of democratic control.
The first section of the book presents a brief but important contextual history of economic inequality in the United States. The extreme concentration of wealth that we have witnessed since the 1970s, according to Page and Gilens, contrasts with the presence of relative equality and democracy that existed (at least among white males) during the Jacksonian period (p. 21) and in the immediate decades after World War II. However, since the 1970s, changing demographics, global trade, and new production technologies have led to an explosion in economic inequality.
In particular, the twin developments of global wage competition and labor-saving automation fell hardest on those at the lower end of the income spectrum. Whereas many European countries made important strides in softening the blow of these economic upheavals, the United States failed to adequately respond. The result has been a dramatic rise in both economic and political inequality in the United States. The consequences for democratic processes of these large-scale economic shifts, according to Page and Gilens, have been staggering. Drawing on an extensive set of public opinion and legislative data, they argue that America’s political elites respond first and foremost to corporate interests and pay little heed to the policy preferences of the mass public.
On issues such as climate change, gun violence, immigration, public education, and social welfare, the majority of the American public favors more governmental action (p. 53). Yet efforts to produce government action have been thwarted by a political system biased toward the status quo. Page and Gilens identify a variety of political mechanisms through which economic inequality has “thwarted the will of the people” (chapter 3). Notable among these are the campaign finance system. Offering an assessment that will ring familiar to many critics of the modern campaign finance regulatory regime, Page and Gilens argue that wealthy elites play an outsized role in driving the agendas of both major political parties. The reliance of candidates in both parties on wealthy donors to finance their campaigns distorts the whole system toward those interests at the expense of ordinary citizens.
The institutional structure of the national government further exacerbates the bias of the government toward the status quo. Page and Gilens aim extra ire at the US Senate (pp. 210–14). The joint impact of state-based representation and of the filibuster serves to empower a minority of the nation’s voters and frustrate the will of the majority. But the Senate is not the sole institutional culprit. Indeed, few modern political institutions—the method of selecting and nominating candidates, congressional committees and leadership, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court—escape their criticism.
The second half of the book shifts from diagnosis to remedy. The cure that Page and Gilens propose is to curb the influence of money and boost citizen participation in the political system. Their defense of democracy is not anchored in the skills or political expertise of individual citizens, but rather in the cumulatively derived expertise of population aggregates composed of interacting, interdependent citizens who engage in various forms of collective deliberation. At best, and as the authors suggest, citizens are not “perfect” guardians of the political process, but they are “pretty good” guardians.
The final section of the book takes the argument into a realm not often entered by most contemporary political science scholarship. Harkening back to a tradition of scholarship more akin to Progressive Era intellectuals, Page and Gilens call for a new social movement—a citizen movement aimed at enhancing the underlying institutions of democracy. Drawing on the lessons of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, the New Deal era, and the civil rights movement, Page and Gilens offer a roadmap for democratizing the current political system.
Overall, Page and Gilens offer a comprehensive analysis of a number of problems confronting the continuing pursuit of democracy in America. Their proposed solution—decreasing the power of money in politics and empowering ordinary citizens—is hard to argue with on normative grounds. As a result, we are much in agreement with the authors. To facilitate a critical dialogue, however, we point to three potential challenges to their optimistic view of enhanced citizen participation as leading to more economic equality.
First, Page and Gilens view the divide between wealthy elites and the mass public as the primary disruptor of democratic processes. One might argue, however, that we have also seen a contagion of citizen-led grassroots disruptions of democratic processes in relatively recent American history. These democratic disruptions are not simply a consequence of elite provocateurs; they are sometimes amplified by patterns of communication among citizens who are engaged in full-throated attacks aimed not only at political elites but also at their fellow citizens. Citizens demonstrating on behalf of civil rights in 1965 were attacked as they peacefully marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This was not merely the activity of rogue law enforcement, however: it was indeed supported by a large part of the white population. More recently, activists of the Far Right have clashed with protesters demanding police reform in places like Minneapolis, Portland, Washington, DC, Kenosha, and elsewhere.
Second, Page and Gilens envision a form of collective deliberation among ordinary citizens that counterbalances the dominant role of moneyed elites (pp. 8–14). Although many individual citizens may not pay a great deal of attention to politics, they are typically located in networks of communication with other citizens that carry the potential to provide political guidance when those individual opinions become aggregated. The problem is, of course, that the same processes that communicate useful, factual information are also capable of communicating misleading, incoherent, and simply false information.
Page and Gilens address the problem of misinformation propagated by elites (pp. 63–66), but they pay less attention to misinformation that can be spread by citizens themselves. The rise of social media makes it more difficult to discern misinformation even within self-chosen networks of communication. Thus, how well collective deliberation works in an environment where misleading or false information may be easily spread by citizens, either intentional or not, remains an important question.
Third, as Page and Gilens argue, “Most countries have, in effect, used public policies to insure that the economic gains from advanced technology and international trade are widely shared. We [the United States] have not” (p. 47). The question that arises, is Why not? Page and Gilens point to the concentration of economic wealth among elites that frustrates the calls for more generous social welfare policies. Our own analyses point toward the absence of a successfully unified working-class coalition—an absence that has typically arisen due to divisions and competition within the working classes, frequently based on race and ethnicity.
For example, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the steady stream of new working-class immigrants coming to US cities from other countries, as well as from rural America, created surplus labor that made it difficult to organize powerful working-class movements. It also created racial and ethnic conflict within the US working class. Although the American labor movement made important strides in organizing the working class, the internal ethnic and racial divisions within the working class limited their efforts. More recently, regressive populists, notably Donald Trump, have once again dialed up racial resentment as an electoral strategy to divide racial and ethnic groups with otherwise common economic interests.
These challenges do not detract from the overall scope and message of the book. Page and Gilens have written a thoughtful, accessible assessment of contemporary American politics. It deserves attention from anyone who cares about the future of America’s governing institutions.
