Is Majority Rule Now A Myth In America?

Two prominent political scientists, Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, were curious about  the nature of power in modern American politics. More specifically, they wanted answers to some very important questions:

"Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless?"

To answer those questions, they identified 1,779 policy disputes from 1981 to 2002** in which polling data were available and in which the responses were broken down by income. Using that data, they identified the policy preferences for those Americans at the 10th percentile of income, at the 50th percentile of income and at the 90th percentile of income. That gave them a pretty good grasp of what poor people wanted out of politics, what the middle class wanted out of politics and what the wealthy wanted out of politics.
Not surprisingly, Gilens and Page found a very tight match between the opinions of those at the 50th income percentile and the opinions of the American majority. The middle class, in other words, exerts a powerful influence over public opinion in this country. Culturally, they remain its foundation.
But that's not the real question. The real question is: Does the middle class exert an equally powerful influence over the actual outcome of policy debates? Is this a country in which the majority can be said to rule?
No.
In fact, the policy desires of the middle class or the majority appear to have no impact whatsoever. Time and again, Gilens and Page found, policy decisions instead reflected the outcome that was desired by those at the 90 percent income level. If the elites opposed a policy, they wielded an effective veto over it.
Or as Gilens and Page put it:

"When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy....
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."

In a sense, the study validates the sense of frustration and even impotence that has fueled the Tea Party movement and much of the Republican base. They're right; they ARE being ignored. They're right; their voices are not being heard. They're right; the elites who actually run the place have tuned them out.
Or to quote Gilens and Page again:

.... average citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact.

There is of course one major difference between the Tea Party world view and the findings of Page and Gilens. The GOP base believes that government is not run by and for economic elites, but by and for poor people who have become reliant on government for subsistence. As you'll recall, that was the core of Mitt Romney's anguished complaint about the 47 percent during the 2012 campaign.
It's a critique that Romney, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and others who share his 14-percent tax bracket are quite happy to propagate. After all, in that version of reality, they are not controlling the system; like the Tea Party members, they too are powerless victims of the system, fighting for survival against their common enemy.****
It's curious: We live in a world in which corporate after-tax profits are at an all-time high, wealth and income are concentrating at the top and already sky-high CEO salaries are rising at a rate 10 to 20 times that of their employees. Yet all this is allegedly occuring at a time in which "the producers" have little or no power and in fact are victims being hounded to within an inch of their lives and fortunes.

by Jay Bookman

One should laugh if it were not all so serious but of course you get this last part? There is then of course no other option but to understand that the corporate media particularly represented in the form of Fox News and CNN as well, and funded essentially by the wealthy, have created and fed this alternate reality to be presented to you. You bit, you swallowed and thusly changed the way your brain interprets data presented to you that otherwise should have warned you that you were being ripped off. The proof of this? You put the corporate serving right-wing back in charge of the U.S. Congress and of course you can say that you did not have other choices and that as a matter of practical reality is true but then you wouldn't say that would you?

Two realities face us today. Mass surveillance systems are being set up to watch and potentially cover everything you do and your vote is not affecting what your elected representatives do.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?