Study Finds US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that '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.'"

Comments

Revolt?

[duke_cheetah2003]

Does this give us a free pass to revolt now?

I do believe the founding fathers would like it that way.. if the government isn't right, take up arms, overthrow it, and put it back the right way.

Re:Revolt?

[Opportunist]

Well, there have been rebellions and revolutions by "men of the people", but they are usually not too numerous. Right now, though, this is about the only kind of revolution that could happen. Everyone powerful certainly doesn't want a revolution. Everyone wealthy is in the aforementioned group. Wealth and power have become synonymous. So what's left is keeping the masses from finding someone out of their own group to rally behind.

That's why we need total surveillance. Such a person must be identified early, before he can develop a following. Do you think we'd have so many problems if we identified MLK earlier, slandered him early enough, before people were able to see through it? Character assassination is much more efficient than actual assassination. It's far quieter and you will not create a martyr, which is about the worst case that could happen. Of course, for it to work out, you have to find the person early, as long as people would still rather believe your lies about him. Once they know him, it's harder to convince the masses.

Re:Are you kidding

[Thanshin]

It starts before that. You must first suppress the knowledge of history by underfunding teaching institutions and manipulating curricula.

Only when the people are ignorant of their past can you pull such ridiculous capitalist dictatorships without opposition.

Ignorance is the one and only true enemy. Trying to convince the ignorant is a losing strategy, teaching the next generation is the only correct first step.

Tyrant: The computer game

[Neo-Rio-101]

I learnt an interesting political lesson on my Commodore 64 back in the day.

There was this political sim called "Tyrant" (ancient descendant of Tropico, or civilisation), and you played as the dictator of a communist state.
It was a pretty hard game, as most times the state would collapse and there'd be a revolution.

Eventually, after playing it long enough I managed to find the one way to prevent that state from ever collapsing and have it eternally make money.

Firstly, you had to invade all the surrounding countries and smash external threats.
Then you convert to a democracy and install elections.
Then you generate lots and lots of jobs for people in the secret police
Then you brainwash the populace with masses spent on election funding.
With the population happy and brainwashed, you could raise the tax rate through the roof and no-one would care... also thanks to the huge secret police force they would turn on each other instead of resist the ridiculous taxation and the root cause of said taxation (thanks to election brainwashing)

Does this sound familiar?

It was kinda fun for a buggy BASIC program.

The U. S. of A. does not operate in this mode

[Taco Cowboy]

"...because the politicians do, as you say, simply have to FRAME a proposal in language which RESONATES with the worldview of the people being targeted..."

Sadly, you do not know the US of A.

The politicians inside the United States of America do not need to frame any proposal to the people, all the need to do to get anything done is to use their influence to rally a portion of semi-elites to his or her cause, and through the butterfly effect , it is done.

Case in point - United States attacking Iraq

When George Bush decides to attack Iraq, he did not need to get the approval from the Americans. All he did was to rally the world community (elites from different countries) to his cause, and when he got the support, off goes the Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

I was from China, and I still remember how hard the Chinese Communist Party had to rally their own people to support their decision to send troops into Korea to fight the Korean war.

In contrast to what George Bush did - the Chinese government, under Mao, almost tapped into all the resources it could muster, to get the people into the mood.

In a way, at least back in the time of the Korean War, the Communist government which rule China was more attuned to their own people, than George Bush, to the Americans.