The Three True Pillars Of American Democracy

Investor-centric capitalism will always and everywhere work to buy political power to subjugate the interests of the public to the interests of the corporation and its owners. This is a structural feature of our economic system, a straightforward result of the profit motive. This is why our failure to properly constrain corporate power has led directly to our democratic crisis. President Donald Trump, for all his outrages, is more symptom than cause. The real problem is the relentless nibbling away at the institutions that enable people to wield and maintain a countervailing power to capital. 

It’s important to tax the rich (to subtract from their economic power), and it’s important to build a stronger social safety net (to meet people’s basic needs so they have time to dedicate to political action). But there are three issues even more fundamental. They are the things that provide the intellectual and material infrastructure necessary for us to carry on as a democracy at all. All three of these things are being targeted for eradication by the political Right. 

The first is public education. Without it, instilling shared democratic values becomes impossible. Voucherization and privatization are constant threats. Thankfully, political support for public education is close to ubiquitous in the Democratic Party — though that support could erode if the pull of tech money ever outweighs the pull of teachers unions. 

The second is a free press. To a degree that much of the public does not understand, the level of local and public service journalism that existed throughout the 20^th century has already been destroyed, thanks toplatforms like Meta and Google. These tech giants figured out how to reap all of the advertising revenue of the media industry for themselves, without needing to produce any journalism. Unfortunately for the public, our democracy can’t function without journalists holding political power accountable — a fact that makes the economic collapse of the industry more worrying than typical tech-induced ​“creative destruction.” Public financing for journalism (particularly local news) is the only way to fill the gap. Such funding is being pushed at the state level, but there is currently no concerted effort to make it a part of the national Democratic platform. That must change. The costs to both the Democratic Party and to small-d democracy of the disappearance of professional journalism are too high to ignore. 

The third is labor unions. If you are reading this, you probably know that the ongoing decline in union power and density since the middle of the 20^th century has both enabled the rich to accrue vast new hoards of wealth and robbed the working class of the political power that it held a generation ago. Unions have pinned their hopes for a comeback on rewriting our awful labor laws. That would be great. But the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, and we haven’t rolled it back yet. To organize enough new union members today, we need a lot more money to hire a lot more union organizers. One place that money can come from: the federal government. It’s not a pipe dream. Likely incoming New York Congresswoman Claire Valdez is advocating exactly that policy. Again, the Democratic Party must move this issue from its fringes into the center of its platform, or we are not really taking the underlying threat seriously. 

It is no coincidence that decades of successful attacks on the funding models of public education, the free press and labor unions have made it easy for the oligarchy to consolidate its own power. These are the three institutions that educate, inform and empower U.S. residents to participate in their own democratic government in a more-than-imaginary way. Republicans, the party of the rich, are quite open about their hatred of all three of these institutions. The Democrats must be even more vicious in their defense.

Crucially, this must be not a rhetorical but a material defense. We need to declare that these three things are inalienable public goods, proper domains for public funding. We must create dedicated government funding streams to not just improve public schools, but also to create basic, competent local journalism in every community, and to enable every working person to have access to a union organizer who can help them exercise their right to collective bargaining. Journalism and unions won’t revive themselves — the legal and economic environments have tilted too far against them for that. Government intervention on their behalf is common sense, once you understand how far the balance of power has already swung away from these public-interest institutions and toward centibillionaires and trillion-dollar companies.

Likewise, where do you think the negative effects of artificial intelligence are going to show up most vividly? In schools, in the information environment, and in the automation of work. The tech-fueled erosion of these three pillars of democracy is only getting started.

As it stands, the federal government is the last great power center with enough money to prop up the other power centers that can serve as a bulwark against the continuing concentration of wealth and power in a few lotion-soft Silicon Valley hands. Democrats need to be unapologetic in fighting for, and funding, the schools and the press and the unions that allow U.S. residents to understand what is happening and to stand together against it. Many things are important, yes. But this is the most important. Let’s focus.