![]() ![]() In books with titles like The New Plutocracy, Triumphant Plutocracy, and Plutocracy, the critics warned that the new extremes of inequality might initiate a vicious cycle that could ultimately undermine democracy altogether. The clamor of criticism reached a high point in the years around the First World War, when inequalities of income and wealth had reached unprecedented heights. Later Populist and Progressive critics of American democracy echoed Tocqueville and elaborated on his critique of plutocracy. If it were to endure, it would have to steer between the rocks of tyranny by the poor and the whirlpool of corruption by the rich. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America described a democracy caught between Scylla and Charybdis. ![]() Once ordinary citizens perceive that politicians are for sale to the highest bidder, he thought, they may gradually withdraw from public affairs, until they have left the government entirely in control of the plutocrats. “While the rulers of aristocracies sometimes seek to corrupt,” he wrote, “those of democracies prove corruptible.” What Tocqueville meant by “corruption” was not just bribery. ![]() But precisely because rulers were not independently wealthy, they could be suborned by other people who were. The promise of democracy in America was that politicians could ascend to office without inheriting wealth or title. Less famously, he also warned that it could become a despotism of the rich minority. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, How Washington Made the Rich Richer-and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Simon and Schuster, 2011.Īlexis de Tocqueville famously warned that democracy in America could become a tyranny of the poor majority. Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012. Martin Gilens, in Affluence and Influence. Reviewed: Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus, Unequal Political voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012. ![]()
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