The Democracy Crisis That Is Never Discussed
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Corporate media’s democracy-in-crisis discourse almost never mentions the gap between what Americans want and what corrupt elected officials are doing
In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.”
Seven years later, America is witnessing a very public and explicit illustration of this situation in real time — and Tuesday's off-year election results are the latest confirmation that the country seems pretty ticked off about the situation ahead of the 2022 midterms.
In America's nationalized politics, those off-year elections were dominated by headlines from Washington, where President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers have spent months agreeing to whittle down their social spending reconciliation bill at the demand of corporate donors and their congressional puppets.
The cuts almost perfectly spotlight the democracy crisis. Indeed, the specific initiatives being slashed or watered down in the Biden agenda bill share two traits: 1) They would require the wealthy and powerful to sacrifice a bit of their wealth and power and 2) They are quite literally the most popular proposals among rank-and-file voters.
Dems Are Slashing The Things Voters Most Want
New polling demonstrates the silencing effect that systemic corruption is having on voter preferences:
82 percent of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare — and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72 percent saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill. On Tuesday, Democrats announced they had reached a deal on a drug pricing plan, which Politico described as “far weaker” than Democrats’ promised legislation. One industry analyst said the deal "seems designed to let legislators claim an achievement while granting pharma protection."
The poll also found 70 percent of voters support including paid family and medical leave for new parents in Democrats' spending bill. Manchin has demanded this item be cut — reportedly after he inexplicably asked about imposing work requirements on it, too.
After railing against the GOP’s 2017 tax law for years, Democrats have largely refused to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and they are reportedly solidifying a deal to have the bill spend more on brand new tax breaks for the super-rich than on the fight against climate change. This, even though Biden’s own pollsters found that raising taxing on the wealthy was “the most popular of more than 30 economic proposals” they tested during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Many of these findings were summarized in a memo last month from the Biden-aligned nonprofit Priorities USA, which warned that “there could be consequences” if Democrats fail to deliver on their promised agenda. The organization wrote that its polling found the most popular issue among swing voters was “the Democratic proposal to make the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share in taxes.” The second most popular item was adding dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.
The flip side of all this also appears to be true — Democrats have protected initiatives to enrich powerful corporations, even though some of those measures aren’t very popular. One example: subsidies for health insurance plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace that shower money on for-profit insurers. Morning Consult reports that extending new ACA premium tax credits passed by Democrats in March “is the lowest-ranking of all the health measures included in the poll.”
A slim majority of voters notably told Morning Consult that Democrats’ negotiations over the individual components of their social spending plan have been unproductive — suggesting people aren’t entirely as dumb as Congress thinks.
Throughout his first year in office, Biden has been generating headline after headline after headline after headline about his administration abandoning Democrats' most popular initiatives. The results of this middle finger to voter preferences? New polling shows that almost three quarters of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction; Biden's job approval rating is at the lowest of any president in history at this point in their term; Democrats were destroyed in this week's off-year elections; and corporate media is predictably trying to manufacture the fantastical storyline that this is the fault of the left.