by Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox
When deluded rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, it was a moment of truth. After Wednesday even the most milquetoast of politicians could not minimize the existential threat that the Trump movement poses to democracy. They, like all U.S. Americans, had to pick a side. Thankfully, most were repulsed by the failed coup. Rather than simply hope that the next band of armed reactionaries fails too, it is time to shore up U.S. democracy by making it finally live up to the name. Democracy is strongest when large numbers of people are actively engaged. Far too many U.S. Americans are not, because of structures erected to limit participation based on race and income.
In our research about poverty in the United States for the book Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty, we were struck by how rare it is for the vast number of low-income workers to organize and demand better lives for themselves and their families. Pre-COVID, 40% of U.S. adults could not afford to meet their own basic needs. That’s more than 150 million people — dwarfing the crowd of voters who cast their support for either presidential candidate. In the past year, the ranks of the poor in the U.S. swelled by 8 million. So why haven’t they organized for a $15 minimum wage, universal health care and a slew of other policies that would benefit them and that our country could easily afford? Because the many barriers erected to limit their participation in civic life are hideously effective.
The most obvious barrier is at the polls. If you make voting difficult and time consuming, you dissuade hourly-wage workers from voting because it literally costs them money to spend hours in needlessly long lines. Poll taxes are not just a memory. In the 2016 election most of the eligible citizens who did not vote had incomes below $30,000.
If the goal were to encourage voting, we wouldn’t schedule single-day elections, on a workday, with all sorts of rules limiting absentee ballots and no use of online voting. Unfortunately, the goal has more consistently been to keep people of color and low-income people from exercising their fundamental right to vote. That’s why Texas Governor Greg Abbott reprehensibly allowed only one ballot drop box per county in his state.
Voting is only the tip of the iceberg. As the cost of running for office becomes astronomical, thanks in part to Citizens United, elected officials must spend more of their time — often the majority of their time — courting wealthy people. Thus access to elected officials is by and large reserved for the rich.
In fact, politicians are quite likely to be wealthy themselves. Most lawmakers in the 166th Congress were millionaires. The president is reputedly a billionaire, though he has never released his taxes to confirm this. Combined, the four candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs spent nearly half a billion dollars. How would a low-income person make the necessary connections to mount such a campaign?
Money is not the only resource that people in poverty lack. There is also time. The time occupied by working two jobs eliminates the time you can devote to a cause. And if you have children, there is even less time available, presuming you can afford a babysitter. We interviewed an environmental activist fighting against a liquid natural gas facility in her neighborhood — a low-income area that already had more than its share of industrial polluters. She told us that it was very difficult to get people excited about a potential danger to their health when they were already living with food insecurity. Poverty creates such toxic stress, such an endless parade of emergencies, that it takes something extraordinary to facilitate political participation.
We were inspired by the time we spent with members of the Newark Think Tank on Poverty, low-income people organizing for justice. When we met them, they had already been successful in passing a ban-the-box law that prohibits employers from asking applicants about criminal history on an initial job application. One of their members had secured a seat on the board of a local nonprofit that serves people in poverty — believe it or not, a rarity. They were driving policy in their area.
We found other such groups claiming their political power and promoting economic fairness. But these examples are lights in a dark landscape. The people demanding to participate in democracy must be courageous because the process by default excludes them. They are rebels, not like the mobs that threatened our Congress. These are pro-democracy rebels. The best way to affirm U.S. democracy is to make sure there is no price of admission.
Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox are the authors of Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty. Goldblum is also Founder and CEO of National Diaper Bank Network.