“Power is being shifted from the many to the few”: Report exposes scope of the 1 percent’s attack on democracy

Big government talk aside, the 1 percent's real victim is democracy itself, Democracy Initiative experts tell Salon

Elias Isquith

If you had to describe the state of American democracy today in three words, you could do a lot worse than: “Not great, Bob!”

Because whether we’re looking at voting rates, campaign donations, congressional approval, legislative initiative, or something as simple as paving roads and fixing bridges, American democracy’s health — and its ability to maintain its own legitimacy in the eyes of Americans — is, well, not great.

Treating all of these issues one-by-one, however, can make the problem seem both worse and better than it is. Worse, because so many disparate sources of failure suggest that no fixes are possible, and make sentiments like “this is just the way the world is” — or other such fatalist pablum — increasingly hard to resist. Better, because it undersells how expansive, well-funded and coordinated is the attempt to place American plutocracy on an unshakable foundation.