WSWS: The crisis of American democracy: its social and political roots [View All]

The article starts with the right wing's veto of the recent Reagan movie and moves on to other signs of decay. Nothing most of us haven't read before, but it's a nice summary of our current deteriorating situation. Strange how those Socialists sometimes make a lot more sense than more respected media voices.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/cbs-n14.shtml

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The WSWS and the SEP drew the fundamental conclusion that there exists within the American ruling elite no significant constituency for the defense of democratic rights. This conclusion has been amply confirmed by the events of the past three years.

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The widening chasm between the financial oligarchy and the masses of working people has been accompanied by other, related processes that undermine the foundations of democracy. The traditional social base for parliamentary democracy is the middle-class layers that serve as a buffer between the two main contending classes—the capitalist elite and the working class. But the vast changes in economic life linked to the globalization of production and the rise of giant transnational corporations have dissipated middle-class America and sharply reduced its social and political weight.

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The agenda of this increasingly dominant element within the ruling elite is the removal of all legal, political and moral restraints on the accumulation of corporate profit and personal wealth—whether in the form of environmental regulations, health and safety codes, anti-trust laws, union rights, minimum wage standards, or limitations on the work day and child labor. These forces demand a vast retrogression in the social conditions and democratic rights of the working class—a return to the policies of laissez-faire, but on a more brutal scale than that which prevailed even in the heyday of the robber barons.

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This rise of a criminal element finds its consummate political expression in the Bush administration, where naked greed commingles with brutality and contempt for the democratic rights of the people. It is a government of, by and for the American oligarchy.

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