The Poor and Democracy

   Given the constant tripe espoused by the right-wing in America about the poor voting for benefits. I thought it was time to hit back. What pushed me was this recent article "Registering the Poor to vote is Un-American" which contains a choice quote:

  "Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on 
registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on

to vote themselves more benefits by electing

redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are

particularly open to demagoguery and bribery."

This essentially sums up the Republican attitude to the poor and democracy. Given that it is a particular talking point and given that it is true that poorer demographics vote for less right-wing candidates (I am loathe to call the Democrats left-wing as, at best, they approach centre), it would make for an interesting investigation to determine whether or not this position is true. Well first off the figures on welfare and its effectiveness in America are telling. It is not, however, what I want to focus on and so I'll just give you the figure above which is a chart showing average monthly welfare benefits in 2006 dollars.

     Instead I want to ask whether or not the poor, by weight of numbers, have a strong influence on policy decisions and despite the nominal notion of democracy the answer would seem to be no. I refer the reader to this paper by Martin Gilens of Princeton University: Inequality and Democratic Reponsiveness in the United States.

Abstract:

"In this paper, I examine the extent to which the link between public preferences and government policy is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set of almost 2,000 survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans....."


  The graphs alone are most telling of the impact of wealth on democratic power:

     The 10th percentile (those richer than or equal to exactly 10 percent of people) have essentially no influence on democratic decisions whereas the 90th percentile (those richer than or equal to 90 percent of people) can greatly impact policy decisions. Even the 50th percentile (those richer than 50 percent of people) have nowhere near the influence of the top 10 percent. Now that we have tested this empirically (something Republicans loath) the evidence is fairly clear, the idea that the poor have a disproportionate impact on democracy due to weight of numbers is clearly incorrect and instead we see that the idea that big business and the wealthy having an unfair stake in democracy is true.

  Can we expect the Republicans, among others, to drop this notion of 'mob rule' and voting for benefits? Not very likely. It makes for good (if wholly incorrect) politics. The only time the poor have any reasonable say (in proportion to their numbers) is when the issues are of high salience (or the rich agree).

   Unfortunately I don't think that this political sleight of hand and its accompanying red scare elements (highly evident in the American Thinker article) will be leaving American politics anytime soon. Instead, I imagine it will be used as a stick to beat the poor and reduce their power even further, both through technocratic developments and by using this idea of the poor voting for money as a rhetorical device. Time will tell.

Authoritarianism and Neoliberalism

     One of the great ironies of Neoliberalism is the fact that in order to provide freedom and economic progress it has to use increased authoritarianism in order to put down those who don't share in the economic progress (i.e. much of the population).

     This has been a constant theme throughout the Neoliberalist world and it is by no means a coincidence that the first Neoliberal experiment required the dictator Pinochet in Chile. Across Latin America, Neoliberal regimes were lead by dictators who ruthlessly crushed opposition to their plans. In countries like Mexico and Columbia, the war on drugs is the front under which opposition is fought, a great irony considered the explosion in the drug trade was a result of Neoliberalism The same was occuring across the world in Indonesia under General Suharto and South-East Asia in general. Even in Iraq, the invasion has lead to the crushing of trade unions and a Neoliberal constitution.

    The Developed World fares no differently in this repect. In the U.S., the poor were criminalised, again under the pretext of a war on Drugs. This gave both an ideological and practical way of dismissing the concerns of the poor. Throw them in prison, they're just drug addicts. This lead to the explosion of prison populations in the U.S., a country that accounts for 5% of the world's population accounts for 25% of the world's prison population. We have seen the same trend in the U.K.

Now, why is this relevant? Well, today Cameron is aboutfacing on his cuts to the police. Was this predictable? Well personally, I was surprised when I heard that he was cutting the police in the first place. That said, when nothing happened I thought I was perhaps mistaken. In the wake of the riots however it seems that Neoliberalism does indeed lead to increased authoritarianism in order to crush any opposition or discontent.


We should probably look back to the Queen of Neoliberalism, a Miss Margaret Thatcher who set the ball rolling in the U.K.. What did Thatcher do in terms of police spending? Well, she increased police numbers in England and Wales from 89,226 in 1979 to over 93,000 in 1981, spending on the police increased rapidly, going from £1,035 million in 1978 to more than double that amount by 1982-3 and up again to £3,825 million by 1988-9. [Source: R Reiner and M Cross (eds), Beyond Law and Order: Criminal Justice Policy and Politics into the 1990s (Macmillan, 1991).].Cameron should have learned from this as it allowed Thatcher to enjoy the support of the police in the crushing of the Miner's strike and other protests against her rule. Today he is seeing the mistake of his overconfidence in his abilities and will attempt to regain the confidence that the police have lost in him.


What will Cameron do now? It seems he may have to call on the old reserves of Neoliberalism, patriotism and fear. In yet another irony, Neoliberalism which is supposed to end the idea of nation-states and terror often requires nationalistic fervour and fear to maintain support. Whether it was the Soviets for Reagan, the Falklands and the IRA for Thatcher, The War on Terror for Bush and Blair it is a constant trend in Neoliberalism, fear and patriotism. It remains to be seen whether or not Cameron will be able to whip up nationalist fervour in the wake of the riots, if not he may have to declar a war, perhaps on some new aspect of terrorism (maybe an IRA resurgence) or some small-time dictator. These remain unlikely however as declaring war on dictators is becoming more and more unpopular and the IRA don't seem to be giving him anything. 

    Cameron could attempt to build up fear regarding a collapse of moral society but this runs the risk of causing it to become true and may cause a strengthening of class differences. All in all, Cameron's best target is the EU. He can paint the EU as the external enemy, the problem, and he can use the recent riots to help. He will probably propose tough measures and then when these contradict EU laws he will use that as a platform to launch a general attack on British involvement in the EU. Other than that, only an attack on British soil will help Cameron create a mood of nationalism and fear.

Cold War Paranoia

   In the 1970's Team B was set up, after being heavily pushed for by a younger Donald Rumsfeld. It served as an ideological weapon with which the Neoconservatives would drum fear into the American people and so pave way for their election (in the form of Ronald Reagan with his missile gap).
    One of the most disgraceful pieces of distortion was with regard to anti-submarine warfare. The CIA believed that the Soviets were not putting large amounts of resources into a submarine detection system. Team B in an incredible leap of paranoid logic took the same facts and concluded the following - the fact that the evidence was lacking was evidence in itself!
   The reasoning? Clearly if there were no clear signs of a submarine detection system it meant that the Soviets had developed a system completely indetectable to the U.S.! This reminds me of a wonderful scene in the fantastic book A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick when the main character and his friends return home, paranoid about whether or not their home was broken into in their absence.

    "When they rolled to a stop in the driveway, parked , and walked warily toward the front door, they found Barris's note and the door unlocked, but when they cautiously opened the door everything appeared as it had been when they left.
     Barris's suspicions surfaced instantly. "Ah," he murmered, entering. He swiftly reached to the top of the bookshelf by the door and brought down his .22 pistol, which he gripped as the other men moved about. The animals approached them as usual, clamoring to be fed.

    "Well, Barris," Luckman said, "I can see you're right. There definitely was someone here, because you see—you see, too, don't you, Bob?—the scrupulous covering-over of all the signs they would otherwise left testifies to their—""

    In precisely the same fashion as the paranoid drug addicts above, for the Neoconservative, a lack of evidence is evidence of a still greater crime. One has to wonder how much this influenced Rumsfeld and Bush when they considered WMDs in Iraq. And as they sought to instil fear in the American people as Reagan did with his missile gap.