Is the United States of America a plutocracy?

GeoLibCogScientist

As stated above, I am arguing that the United States is a plutocracy.

Here are my contentions:

C1: The wealthy and interest groups for corporations have the most influence over what policies actually get passed.

First, while it's true that everyone 18+ who isn't a felon gets to vote in the US, I argue those votes do not change anything in terms of what policies actually get passed. Indeed, the votes can change who is in office, and those people in office may have the best intentions to follow the new things they claim they are for, but this study from researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page of Princeton University, found that "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantialindependent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or noindependent influence." [1] Additionally, this makes sense even if votes are putting in people who legitimately want to do what voters want. Anyone can have the best intentions, but if they are given massive donations, humans naturally feel the need to reciprocate in some way. Plus, it's far easier to please one corporation or one wealthy person than one's entire constituency.  A meta-analysis had found that people are more likely to trust someone for purposes of reciprocity when people more frequently do something kind for you. [2]  Voting for a representative in the US happens only every 2 years. Voting for senators, every 6, and president every 4. But there's no limit to how often someone can donate to some politician's cause, so naturally a politician will trust someone who donates to their cause on a monthly basis than someone who votes for them merely every 2, 4, or 6 years.

C2: Several practices in American voting limit the capability of voters to have an impact.

A. I'm sure most of us are aware of gerrymandering and how it still goes on today, so I will not provide any sources on it. But it is nonetheless relevant in that it does decrease the likelihood a politician will represent the people, as a republic supposedly ought to represent.

B. First past the post (FPTP) voting is, perhaps, the least efficient way of representing the will of the people. FPTP's only advantage is that it's simple: whoever gets at least a plurality of votes wins, and people only pick one candidate. However, this leads to issues of strategic voting where people decide to vote for someone because their ideal candidate, they believe has no chance. It also leads to "lesser of two evil" choices. It can also have spoiler candidates and tends to encourage two-party systems since a third major party would be viewed as spoiling the election. On the otherhand, Score-then-instant-runoff(STAR) voting gets rid of all of those problems. This system is one in which people would give every candidate running a score of 0-N, where N would be some maximum number decided(i.e 10). 0 would be indicating you hate the candidate, 10(N) meaning it's your ideal candidate. In regular score-voting, whoever has the highest average of scores would win. However, this still can have some of those issues arise due to that some people may score some candidates equally, which wouldn't be represented in such a system. The solution is then to have instant-runoffs to elliminate the lowest scoring candidates by transferring any scores from a ballot that gave a lower candidate the same score as a higher-scoring candidate, to that higher-scoring candidate. This is honest since the voter ranked both candidates equally, and thus would be further more representative of the public at large. While slightly more complex than FPTP, it's fairly simple in comparison to other methods. People just score each candidate for the ballot. We would average the scores, have run-offs and whoever had the highest average, wins. Of course the tallying of it is complex, but the actual voting is as simple as scoring products one buys from 1-5 stars. For further clarity, here's an additional source talking about it. [3]

C. Every state except Nebraska and Maine does winner-take-all for the electoral college. This also limits the impact voters can have in that it discourages people to come to polls in safe states. For safe states such as Alabama, California, South Carolina, Hawaii, and others, there's almost no point to voting since they're all but guaranteed to go to one party each election. With those states being winner-take-all, voting for any candidate pretty much won't have any impact.

C3: Rich people themselves are the lawmakers, executives, and judiciary
One would be very hard-pressed to name any politician who isn't in the top 1% of income earners in the US. This is clear indication we are ruled by rich people as well. Additionally, many members of congress are on corporation's boards of directors and/or, own businesses, and/or own stock in companies that either are being encouraged to have legislation created for, or have had legislation created which may increase their stock prices. [4][5][6] There are instances in recent news where some of our politicians are trying to stop this or are voluntarily giving up their stock before any legislation or rulings that could potentially affect this [7][8], but it nonetheless does not change the fact that this occured, and has occured for many years in our republic. The damage has been done to democracy, and it will take a long time to undo the many pieces of legislation, actions of the executive branches, and judicial rulings over the past two and a half centuries that have been for the wealthy.

I hereby rest my opening arguments.


Source links:
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5441232/
[3] https://www.equal.vote/starvoting
[4] https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/facebook-twitter-testify-here-are-the-members-who-own-their-stock
[5] https://apnews.com/6547a090a1bb4ffab4b9c5df82dee200
[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-richest-members-congress-made-money-house-senate-2019-2
[7] https://biglawbusiness.com/roberts-sold-at-t-shares-justices-move-away-from-conflicts
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/business/dealbook/insider-trading-act.html