HOW'S DEMOCRACY DOING IN AMERICA?

E.J. Dionne reports:

While the United States wages war to expand democracy around the world, how is our own democracy doing? Not very well, says a group of distinguished scholars.

"[T]he voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally," declares a task force of the American Political Science Association. "The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent."

Disparities in political participation, the report says, "ensure that ordinary Americans speak in a whisper while the most advantaged roar."

All citizens, especially politicians, should study the report of the association's Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, which was released this week. The political scientists proclaim what many of us know instinctively: A government that ought to be helping ordinary citizens rise up tends to help those who are already up. But the report puts facts behind our instincts and shows how unfairness breeds more unfairness.

Since the early 1970s, the report says, we have seen "a massive mobilization into politics of advantaged groups that had not previously been active in Washington." With the decline in union membership, "the already privileged are better organized through occupational associations than the less privileged."
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The report argues, rightly, that "[w]hat government does not do is just as important as what it does." In the not-so-distant past, government created programs to benefit broad groups of citizens -- Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, student loan programs and Pell Grant scholarships.

There have been few comparable innovations recently, and some of the traditional programs have been cut back. "The educational and training benefits for America's all-volunteer military are modest compared with those in the original G.I. Bill and, consequently, have made less impact in boosting the schooling of veterans to the level of non-veterans," the task force writes. So we praise and praise those who serve their country, but do little for them.

"Moreover," the task force says, "rising tuition, the declining value of individual Pell Grants, and state budget cuts have made higher education less affordable to non-veterans at a time when its economic value has risen and its contribution to counteracting the bias in political participation is invaluable." The political system reinforces the inequalities of political participation by cutting off the less privileged from the tools that encourage participation.