We have no one to blame but ourselves. We the people are responsible for the decline of our “social democracy.” In all fairness to us we are handicapped by having a constitutional republic for a government and not a direct democracy type government. In a constitutional government we elect representatives to act in our interests and that way we don’t have the bother of having to vote on all the important stuff to insure our social democracy continues. For more than 60 years now our social democracy has been quietly eroded away.
But it really might have never been there in the first place. James Madison thought the wealthy minority ought to be protected from the tyranny of the majority. From the earliest times of our “great experiment” there exists a myth that the people have the power of self-determination. Now, a countervailing element has doomed that lofty ideal. Money is power and now money is even “speech.” Increasingly income inequality limits majority political speech. Free enterprise, on the other hand has even more sway in the scheme of things than does individual freedom expectations.
The fourteenth amendment was about insuring equal protection for the rights of newly identified persons, ex-slaves. Supreme Court Chief Justice Waite declared in 1886 that the fourteenth amendment also provided corporations with equal protection and a court reporter then extended that corporations must be persons. These new “persons” now had human person power.
Next came the 1971 Powell “memorandum” that was intended to awaken corporations to the need to intervene in elections to battle Ralph Nader types threating corporation “rights.” That helped stimulate a wave of deregulations that unshackled corporate power. The change over from a manufacturing to a consumer economy began as manufacturing jobs disappeared following “free” trade deals. That accelerated the loss of the middle class and ended dreams of personal prosperity for millions.
After Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999, Wall Street Bankers were unleashed and became “too big to fail.” Following the 2008 economic crash bailouts, Presidents Bush and then Obama hired Wall Street Banker minions from Goldman Sacks to run our treasury. And then the Occupy Wall Street movement highlighted the astonishing income inequality in this country.
The Supreme Court was loaded up with right wingers in 2005 and gave us the “Citizen’s United” decision. That buttoned up nicely the rights of corporations to fund political campaigns and influence elections with their money power. According to an assessment by Norm Chomsky the effect of this has been a Plutonomy (Plutocrat economy) that has marginalized us human persons as the Precariat (precarious proletariat).
And we did this to ourselves. We stood by while we were being violated. We didn’t care enough to know about the issues or candidates in an election. For example, right now there is an extremely important question on the ballot this November that has the potential to begin the restoration of human rights over artificial person (corporate) rights. People power over money power in elections. But how many voters know about Question 5, Ranked Choice Voting and how many understand what a huge impact it will have on our self-determination? Voter ignorance has brought us to this point in the loss of social democracy. And nothing will change that until voters educate themselves about issues of such importance as Question five.