Inequality and the Decline of Public Modes of Action: How the Ultra-Rich are Corrupting the Practice of Politics in the United States

• In Event: Historical Populisms and Contemporary Responses

Abstract

In my paper, I draw on Machiavelli’s theory of corruption to theorize a connection between growing economic inequality and declining trust of liberal democratic institutions and rise of anti-system populisms among citizens in the United States. Machiavelli’s theory of corruption asserts the following: significant wealth inequality compromises politics because of the influence it affords an elite few over the experience of political life by ordinary citizens. Under socio-economic conditions of concentrated wealth, those with control over significant resources can, and often do, use those resources to benefit non-elites in modes intended to maintain the excessive social and political power of elites. In Machiavelli’s Florence, the commercial elite that arose in the fifteenth century exploited their wealth to develop networks of clients within the lower echelons of Florentine society through the distribution of political offices, social connections and economic benefits. This elite practice of patronage fostered relations of dependence and a culture of “consensus” (read: deference and loyalty) that weakened the guild republic that had traditionally held the Florentine elite in check, thereby paving the way for the usurpation of power by the Medici.

While the modes of distribution and influence employed by the technocratic elite over the last fifty or so years in the United States are certainly less personal and direct than those exploited by the Medici in fifteenth century Florence, elite intentions, I contend, remain the same: to benefit the class of non-elite citizens in ways meant to secure the status quo and the privileged place of elites in it. In the paper, I identify and analyze trends in education, philanthropy and politics (i.e., a turn towards privatization, effective altruism and market-driven modes of social change) that I contend, are weakening both (1) citizen’s trust in liberal democratic institutions and (2) their disposition to oppose the concentration of economic and political power. Ironically, I conclude, attempts by the wealthy to secure the system that privileges them generate the “anti-system” political culture that destabilizes it.
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Author

• Amanda M. Maher, Drexel University