Democracy, populism, and wealth concentration

Barack Obama gets all three wrong.

Last week, in an interview with Christiane Amanpour. Barack Obama said this:

It's very hard to sustain a democracy when you have. . .massive concentrations of wealth. And so, part of my argument has been that unless we attend to that, unless we make people feel more economically secure and we're taking more seriously the need to create ladders of opportunity and a stronger safety net that's adapted to these new technologies and the displacements that are taking place around the world, if we don't take care of that, that's also going to fuel the kind of mostly far-right populism, but it can also potentially come from the left, that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared.

In other words, vast wealth inequality gives rise to populism which, in turn, undermines democracy.

Obama could be excused for presenting views this unoriginal if they were sound. But they aren’t.

The claim that massive concentrations of wealth pose a threat to American democracy fails as a matter of experience and logic. Wealth inequality was considerably more pronounced 100 years ago than it is today. Yet, American democracy wasn’t in serious jeopardy during the early 1920s. In fact, we were becoming more democratic, thanks to female suffrage.

What’s the most likely outcome in a democracy when wealth inequality is viewed as excessive? Voters will elect politicians who take measures to decrease the inequality. Obama betrays his own lack of appreciation for democracy when he effectively denies its ability to redress perceived unfairness.

If the redress for wealth inequality is extreme, the economy will probably suffer and individual freedoms will diminish. But the outcome will be democratic.

What about populism? Should we regard it as a threat to American democracy — a “middleman” in the dystopian process Obama posits?

We should not. Nor did Obama provide any basis for believing we should.

Populism becomes a major force in America when a large chunk of the population concludes that neither of the two major political parties has any real desire to address its concerns and, indeed, views these concerns with contempt. When this perception gains steam, American populists do one of two things: They form their own party or they take control of a major party.

Both responses are entirely democratic. Indeed, it’s a sign of democratic health when populists choose either course.

The alternative means of redress is to attempt to overthrow the government violently. American populists have eschewed serious efforts to accomplish this.

Obama might cite the rioting of January 6, 2021. That rioting was sickening and anti-democratic. But the actions of fewer than 1,000 people can’t plausibly be viewed as a serious attempt to overthrow the government.

Today, Trump-style populists are doing what all but fewer than 1,000 of them have always done. They are trying to dominate one of our two political parties and elect their hero president In short, they are behaving democratically.

Finally, is it true that massive concentrations of wealth fuel populism? Again, Obama provides no evidence that they do.

I’ve already identified what I consider the fuel of populism — the view of large numbers of Americans that neither of the two political parties has any real desire to address their concerns. Stated more plainly, it’s the widespread view that the people, broadly defined, are being badly mistreated by the elites.

There will always be an economic dimension to this view. Certainly, that was the case with the Populist party of the 1890s — a coalition of farmers, trade unionists, and middle class activists that gained prominence in the context of an economic depression. The coalition members had specific grievances against the elites, the common thread of which was that the elites had stacked the deck against them. I’m unable to gauge the extent to which wealth concentration itself fueled this movement. So, I’m pretty sure, is Obama.

The fuel for the recent populist movement is less obscure. Its leader, Donald Trump, is an extraordinarily rich man who flaunts his wealth. This makes it hard to argue that wealth concentration is driving the populism.

In fact, the movement Trump leads is solidly middle class, as Jim Geraghty shows:

Most Trump supporters aren’t poor, or even necessarily on the bottom half of the nation’s income scale. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median, sometimes narrowly but sometimes substantially.

In the general election, like the primary, “About two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.” Further analysis found “support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich — that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.”

Polling in 2020 found that the higher a person’s income, the more likely they were to say the economy would improve more in a second term of Trump than under Joe Biden. In the 2020 election, Trump did better among voters making more than $50,000 per year than he did among voters making less than $50,000 per year.

Like previous populist movement, this one is driven by the perception that our elites aren’t interested in the concerns of the populists — and in this case are downright contemptuous of those concerns. But the concerns are primarily cultural, not economic. Again, Geraghty is on point:

[The right-of- center-populists] didn’t go to the right schools, they don’t work in professions that are glamorous or celebrated, their religious faith is mocked and derided, and Hollywood portrays them as a bunch of ignorant hicks. Many of them live in “flyover country,” which is seen as culturally backwards, easily and justifiably ignored.

They work for a living and do not benefit from affirmative action, but they’re told that they have it easy because of “white privilege.” A lot of government officials treat their constitutionally protected ownership of a gun as a major problem to be solved, but shrug their shoulders at the insecure border and illegal immigration. Lots of Americans see a criminal-justice system that comes down like a ton of bricks on pro-life protesters while prominent big-city district attorneys declare they won’t prosecute whole classes of crimes.

Barack Obama, who has himself become extraordinarily wealthy, epitomizes the attitudes that fuel this populism. It’s natural, therefore, that he wants to blame contemporary populism, which came to the fore in the last year of his presidency, on something other than his elitism and that of his fellow limousine liberals.

And because economic redistributionism is at the core of Obama’s agenda, it’s also natural that he wants to blame this populism on wealth concentration — and to claim that wealth concentration is a threat to democracy.

But Obama’s case is without merit. Wealth concentration is not a threat to democracy. Neither is American populism. Nor is contemporary American populism the product of wealth concentration.

With his usual superficiality, Obama goes zero-for-three in his analysis.