The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 04:
“Ordinary Citizens Have No Influence Over Their Government” In practice, the American political system allows only two political parties, which are wholly dependent on corporations and wealthy individuals to fund the most expensive campaigns in the world. Political campaign spending totaled $6 billion in 2012, which works out to $18 per voter. In a well-established democracy like the United Kingdom, spending, by contrast, comes to only about 80 cents per voter. The operatives of these two American parties engineer state electoral laws and gerrymander voting districts so that third-party alternatives are in practice impossible. It is a system that would have felt comfortably familiar to the Whig oligarchs of eighteenth-century England, who ensured that popular participation was a purely formal process.
Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University examined almost two thousand surveys of American opinion on public policy matters between 1981 and 2002, and discovered how those preferences correlated with policy outcomes. “[T]he preferences of economic elites,” Gilens concludes, “have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. . . . I’d say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups—of economic elites and of organized interests.” Our president concurs: during the 2012 election campaign, Obama informed a group of wealthy donors that included Microsoft moguls Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, “You now have the potential of two hundred people deciding who ends up being elected president every single time.”
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