Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Is It Time For an Autopsy on American Democracy?

Last week in a debate between the two candidates running in the special election in Georgia’s 6th district, Karen Handel, the Republican candidate, said quite proudly, “ I do not support a livable wage.” Also last week, the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVoss, said that the department of education has no obligation to protect LGBTQ rights in the classroom

In these comments lies a fundamental divide in American politics. A divide about the role of government, the supremacy of the individual, and role of corporations in the body politics.

It’s important to remember that there is nothing about American democracy that makes it sacrosanct or immortal. That like other democracies before us, our system, our American experiment, can simply vanish or morph into something entirely different.

It seems the fundamental question is, have we changed as a nation? Is the reality of what the founders gave us incompatible with modernity, and/or is there simply something in the DNA of America that makes us not exceptional, as some would have us believe, but the exception in the form of the non democratic democracy that we have today?

Professor Corey Dolgon wonders if it's already too late in Kill It to Save It: An Autopsy of Capitalism's Triumph over Democracy.

My conversation with Corey Dolgon: