Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > America's Political Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism
________________________________________
America's Political Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism
By Robert Kuttner [1] / Huffington Post [2]
November 23, 2015
There's a must-read article if you want to understand why Democrats are
losing the support of low income people who benefit from government programs
like Medicaid and food stamps and logically should vote for Democrats based
on pocketbook interests.
Alex MacGillis, of ProPublica, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review,
observes that for the most part, the poor aren't defecting to Republicans --
they are not voting at all. [3]
His exhibit A is eastern Kentucky, one of America's poorest and most
government-dependent regions. But the poor are so marginalized and
disaffected that they are disconnected from civic life entirely.
Looking more broadly, MacGillis reports that non-voters are far more likely
than voters to have incomes under $30,000, not to have health insurance, not
to have bank accounts, to have received government aid such as food stamps,
to have borrowed money from relatives.
As if to confirm MacGillis's point, consider Saturday's Louisiana
gubernatorial election. Remarkably, the Democrat actually won. All it took
was a thoroughly disgraced and corrupt Republican opponent in David Vitter,
who consorted with prostitutes, and an outgoing incumbent Republican
incumbent, Bobby Jindal, who was a national joke.
How often can Democrats expect that sort of harmonic convergence? Not very.
Even so, Democrat John Bel Edwards, a Catholic social conservative with a
military background, only won 56 percent of the vote.
But the deeper story is in the turnout. Louisiana has 3,536,185 people of
voting age. In the 2012 presidential election, 1,152,262 -- less than a
third -- turned out to vote. Four years ago, in the gubernatorial election
that Jindal won by a landslide, just 673,239 voted. This time, only 444,517
bothered--about one in eight eligible voters. Edwards was elected governor
with the support of about nine percent of the Louisiana electorate.
A lot of the people who stay home would vote for Democrats if they bothered
to vote at all. This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for
getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep
disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems
richly earned.
This is also the soil in which fascism grows. As political scientists have
demonstrated for more than a century, it is mass society, in which people
are disconnected from the "little platoons" beloved of Edmund Burke and the
local associations celebrated by Tocqueville, where a strongman can suddenly
seem the solution to people's inchoate frustrations with their own lives and
the irrelevance of politics.
And evidently, the quiet desperation is such that the crazier the
strongman's pronouncements, the better. Cue Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted
Cruz. Figures like these channel the rage and alienation, not a serious
discussion of remedies.
MacGillis also found a deepening division between the working class and the
poorest of the poor. Far from seeing common interests, struggling working
class voters increasingly have contempt for those who need government
benefits. The economic pressure on the bottom 90 percent divides them
against themselves.
There is no easy solution for the deepening disaffection from politics of
society's most vulnerable. It's not a matter of more clever techniques to
get out the vote.
There was a time in America when poor and working class people did have
representative institutions that connected them to civic and political life.
They were called labor unions.
Even today, with union strength at its lowest level since before the New
Deal, after more than a generation of corporate union busting, union
families are more likely to vote, more likely to vote for progressives, and
more likely to have a political grasp of their situation than people of
similar condition who are non-members.
Other institutions such as worker centers and immigrant self-help groups can
help reconnect society's most marginal. But so far they are no match for the
increased power of society's richest and the feeling on the part of so many
citizens that, as Elizabeth Warren famously puts it, "the game is rigged."
The stakes could not be higher. America is a democracy only to the extent
that citizens feel that it is worthwhile to participate. We are in a race
between new organizing strategies and credible leaders on the one hand, and
demagogues and mass alienation on the other. And time is not on our side.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a visiting
professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is
Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. [4]
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [5]
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________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/americas-political-landscape-providing-fresh
-soil-fascism
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-kuttner
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
[3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-re
d.html?_r=0
[4]
http://www.amazon.com/Debtors-Prison-Politics-Austerity-Possibility/dp/03079
59805
[5] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on America's Political
Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism
[6] http://www.alternet.org/
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > America's Political Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism
America's Political Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism
By Robert Kuttner [1] / Huffington Post [2]
November 23, 2015
There's a must-read article if you want to understand why Democrats are
losing the support of low income people who benefit from government programs
like Medicaid and food stamps and logically should vote for Democrats based
on pocketbook interests.
Alex MacGillis, of ProPublica, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review,
observes that for the most part, the poor aren't defecting to Republicans --
they are not voting at all. [3]
His exhibit A is eastern Kentucky, one of America's poorest and most
government-dependent regions. But the poor are so marginalized and
disaffected that they are disconnected from civic life entirely.
Looking more broadly, MacGillis reports that non-voters are far more likely
than voters to have incomes under $30,000, not to have health insurance, not
to have bank accounts, to have received government aid such as food stamps,
to have borrowed money from relatives.
As if to confirm MacGillis's point, consider Saturday's Louisiana
gubernatorial election. Remarkably, the Democrat actually won. All it took
was a thoroughly disgraced and corrupt Republican opponent in David Vitter,
who consorted with prostitutes, and an outgoing incumbent Republican
incumbent, Bobby Jindal, who was a national joke.
How often can Democrats expect that sort of harmonic convergence? Not very.
Even so, Democrat John Bel Edwards, a Catholic social conservative with a
military background, only won 56 percent of the vote.
But the deeper story is in the turnout. Louisiana has 3,536,185 people of
voting age. In the 2012 presidential election, 1,152,262 -- less than a
third -- turned out to vote. Four years ago, in the gubernatorial election
that Jindal won by a landslide, just 673,239 voted. This time, only 444,517
bothered--about one in eight eligible voters. Edwards was elected governor
with the support of about nine percent of the Louisiana electorate.
A lot of the people who stay home would vote for Democrats if they bothered
to vote at all. This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for
getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep
disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems
richly earned.
This is also the soil in which fascism grows. As political scientists have
demonstrated for more than a century, it is mass society, in which people
are disconnected from the "little platoons" beloved of Edmund Burke and the
local associations celebrated by Tocqueville, where a strongman can suddenly
seem the solution to people's inchoate frustrations with their own lives and
the irrelevance of politics.
And evidently, the quiet desperation is such that the crazier the
strongman's pronouncements, the better. Cue Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted
Cruz. Figures like these channel the rage and alienation, not a serious
discussion of remedies.
MacGillis also found a deepening division between the working class and the
poorest of the poor. Far from seeing common interests, struggling working
class voters increasingly have contempt for those who need government
benefits. The economic pressure on the bottom 90 percent divides them
against themselves.
There is no easy solution for the deepening disaffection from politics of
society's most vulnerable. It's not a matter of more clever techniques to
get out the vote.
There was a time in America when poor and working class people did have
representative institutions that connected them to civic and political life.
They were called labor unions.
Even today, with union strength at its lowest level since before the New
Deal, after more than a generation of corporate union busting, union
families are more likely to vote, more likely to vote for progressives, and
more likely to have a political grasp of their situation than people of
similar condition who are non-members.
Other institutions such as worker centers and immigrant self-help groups can
help reconnect society's most marginal. But so far they are no match for the
increased power of society's richest and the feeling on the part of so many
citizens that, as Elizabeth Warren famously puts it, "the game is rigged."
The stakes could not be higher. America is a democracy only to the extent
that citizens feel that it is worthwhile to participate. We are in a race
between new organizing strategies and credible leaders on the one hand, and
demagogues and mass alienation on the other. And time is not on our side.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a visiting
professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is
Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. [4]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [5]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[6]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/americas-political-landscape-providing-fresh
-soil-fascism
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-kuttner
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
[3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-re
d.html?_r=0
[4]
http://www.amazon.com/Debtors-Prison-Politics-Austerity-Possibility/dp/03079
59805
[5] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on America's Political
Landscape Providing Fresh Soil for Fascism
[6] http://www.alternet.org/
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
