The fall and rise of American democracy

By Daron ACEMOGLU

It should not have come as such a surprise that US voters were largely unmoved by the Democrats’ warnings that Donald Trump poses a grave threat to American institutions. In a January 2024 Gallup poll, only 28% of Americans (a record low) said that they were satisfied with “the way US democracy is working.”

American democracy has long promised four things: shared prosperity, a voice for the citizenry, expertise-driven governance, and effective public services. But US democracy – like democracy in other wealthy (and even middle-income) countries – has failed to fulfill these aspirations.

It wasn’t always so. For three decades following World War II, democracy delivered the goods, especially shared prosperity. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages increased rapidly for all demographic groups, and inequality declined. But this trend came to an end sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, inequality has skyrocketed, and wages for workers without a college degree have barely increased. About half of the American workforce has watched incomes among the other half soar.

While the past ten years were somewhat better (the almost 40-year increase in inequality appears to have stopped sometime around 2015), the pandemic-induced surge in inflation took a big toll on working families, especially in cities. That is why so many Americans listed economic conditions as their main concern, ahead of democracy.

Equally important was the belief that democracy would give voice to all citizens. If something wasn’t right, you could let your elected representatives know. While this principle was never fully upheld – many minorities remained disenfranchised for much of American history – voter disempowerment has become an even more generalized problem over the past four decades. As the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it, many Americans, especially those without a college degree, living in the Midwest and the South, came to feel like “strangers in their own land.”

Worse, as this was happening, the Democrats moved from being the party of working people to becoming a coalition of tech entrepreneurs, bankers, professionals, and postgraduates who share very few priorities with the working class. Yes, right-wing media also stoked working-class discontent.

But it could do so because mainstream media sources and intellectual elites ignored the economic and cultural grievances of a significant share of the public. This trend has also accelerated over the last four years, with highly educated segments of the population and the media ecosystem constantly emphasizing identity issues that further alienated many voters.

If this was simply a case of technocrats and intellectual elites setting the agenda, one could tell oneself that at least the experts were at work. But the promise of expertise-driven governance has rung hollow at least since the 2008 financial crisis.

It was experts who had designed the financial system, supposedly for the common good, and made huge fortunes on Wall Street because they knew how to manage risk. Yet not only did this turn out to be untrue; politicians and regulators rushed to rescue the culprits, while doing almost nothing for the millions of Americans who lost their homes and livelihoods.

The public’s distrust of expertise has only grown, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, when issues such as lockdowns and vaccines became litmus tests for belief in science. Those who disagreed were duly silenced in the mainstream media and driven to alternative outlets with rapidly growing audiences.

That brings us to the promise of public services. The British poet John Betjeman once wrote that “Our nation stands for democracy and proper drains,” but democracy’s provision of reliable drains is increasingly in doubt.

In some ways, the system is a victim of its own success. Starting in the nineteenth century, the United States and many European countries enacted legislation to ensure meritocratic selection and limit corruption in public services, followed by regulations to protect the public from new products, ranging from cars to pharmaceuticals.

But as regulations and safety procedures have multiplied, public services have become less efficient. For example, government spending per mile of highway in the US increased more than threefold from the 1960s to the 1980s, owing to the addition of new safety regulations and procedures.

Similar declines in the productivity of the construction sector have been attributed to onerous land-use regulations. Not only have costs risen, but procedures designed to ensure safe, transparent, citizen-responsive practices have led to lengthy delays in all sorts of infrastructure projects, as well as deterioration in the quality of other services, including education.

In sum, all four pillars of democracy’s promise seem broken to many Americans. But this doesn’t mean that Americans now prefer an alternative political arrangement. Americans still take pride in their country and recognize its democratic character as an important part of their identity.

The good news is that democracy can be rebuilt and made more robust. The process must start by focusing on shared prosperity and citizen voice, which means reducing the role of big money in politics.

Similarly, while democracy cannot be separated from technocratic expertise, expertise can certainly be less politicized. Government experts should be drawn from a broader range of social backgrounds, and it would also help if more were deployed at the local-government level.

None of this is likely to happen under the incoming Trump administration, of course. As an obvious threat to US democracy, he will erode many critical institutional norms over the next four years. The task of remaking democracy thus falls to center-left forces. It is they who must weaken their ties to Big Business and Big Tech and reclaim their working-class roots. If Trump’s victory serves as a wake-up call for the Democrats, then he may have inadvertently set in motion a rejuvenation of American democracy.

Daron Acemoglu, a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and Institute Professor of Economics at MIT, is co-author (with Simon Johnson) of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
www.project-syndicate.org

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