THIS SERIES OF ARTICLES began with the question: Is it possible to take a more effective problem-solving approach to achieving progressive goals? Taking a comprehensive root cause analysis viewpoint, the topmost progressive goal can be summarized as “optimize the long-term common good of all.” This is the general goal of modern liberal democracy.
We are far from achieving that goal or even being on a path to it, because right now the global human system is on a deadly backslide from democracy to authoritarianism. Authoritarians across the globe are ascending to power (like Trump in the US and Le Pen in France) or consolidating their power (like Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Modi in India, and dozens more). See this list of authoritarian states and their leaders, totaling 50 as I write this article.
Progressivism in the US is in crisis. The Republican party continues to move further to the extreme right, led by Donald Trump, currently leading in presidential polls ending February 1. Trump is an authoritarian who plans to destroy democratic institutions once he enters the White House for the second time.
Democratic backsliding is not the only problem progressives have been unable to solve. Others are poverty, discrimination, high inequality of wealth and income, climate change, and lack of reproductive rights. Despite their best efforts, progressives have been unable to achieve their goals.
Let’s call this the Inability to Achieve Progressive Goals Problem, or the Progressive Goals Problem for short. How can it be solved?
That is the question this article begins to answer by applying root cause analysis.
This article is the fourth in a series. Each article builds on the ones before it. The previous articles are:
- Is it possible to take a more effective problem-solving approach to achieving progressive goals?
- Understanding causal diagrams: A tool for achieving progressive goals
- Understanding social force diagrams: A tool for achieving progressive goals
SPECIAL NOTE: For simplicity this analysis mostly examines the problem in the US, since the US is the world’s most influential democracy and is suffering greatly from the problem. However, because the analysis is at such a high level of system behavior, the results are generic and apply to other countries.
Problem definition
THE FIRST STEP in using social force diagrams is problem definition. We need a clear short summary of problem symptoms. This is many unsolved problems hurting the common good.
We can’t solve all the unsolved problems immediately. But once the Progressive Goals Problem is solved, we want the system in a state where they are all gradually being solved. Thus, the new desired symptoms are gradual solution of all problems hurting the common good. This gives our starting social force diagram:
Finding the first intermediate cause
Root cause analysis works by starting at problem symptoms and asking “WHY does this occur?” until the root causes are found. Our first question is thus: WHY do so many unsolved problems hurting the common good exist? Note how different that is from the usual question of “How can we solve this problem or that problem?”
Let’s list the problems and stop at about ten, so that we focus on the forest and not the trees. While this list is not exhaustive, it seems to have most important progressive problems:
- High inequality of wealth and income
- Power of monied special interests (corruption)
- Large recessions
- Lack of reproductive rights
- Environmental unsustainability
- Climate change
- Poverty
- Adequate people’s health and income
- Systemic discrimination
- Democratic backsliding
- War
WHY are all these problems occurring? WHY is the system not successfully solving them?
These are systemic problems so large they are usually solved by governments. Governments are run by elected officials. Thus, part of the first immediate cause is key government decisions.
Who do those decisions favor? It’s not progressives, whose goal is to optimize the long-term common good. Who else could it be?
Follow the money. Inspection of the system shows that because money drives politics in the US, these decisions currently favor powerful monied special interests. These are large for-profit corporations and their main owners, the rich. Both spend unlimited amounts of money to tilt the system their way. The result is government decisions mainly favor them. This leads to the first intermediate cause: Key government decisions that mainly favor powerful monied special interests, known as the Money Drives Politics problem.
Once the Progressive Goals Problem is solved, we want the new first intermediate cause to be: Key government decisions that strongly favor the common good. This gives the revised social force diagram:
Next, we consider the evidence that Money Drives Politics is the main cause of problem symptoms.
Evidence of the first intermediate cause
The evidence is overwhelming that powerful monied special interests effectively control key government decisions in the US. The evidence is so strong it’s easy to conclude that the US is no longer a democracy. It’s a plutocracy, meaning “rule by the rich.”
Consider these pieces of evidence:
Evidence 1. In 2014 Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published an exhaustive, widely cited study that examined who was actually controlling policy in the US. They used “a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues” during 1981 to 2002. Their conclusion, which stunned the academic world, was that:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy [Achieving their interests 78% and 43% of the time, see Table 4.], while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence [Achieving their interests 5% and 24% of the time.].
…the issues about which economic elites and ordinary citizens disagree reflect important matters, including many aspects of trade restrictions, tax policy,corporate regulation, abortion, and school prayer, so that the resulting political losses by ordinary citizens are not trivial.
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States our findings indicate the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized[business] interests, they generally lose.
“Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests” is the same as our “powerful monied special interests.” While the US is theoretically a democracy, the data analyzed by Gilens and Page shows it is in fact a plutocracy. “Average citizens and mass-based interest groups” (such as readers of this article, Daily Kos, ActBlue, and NetRoots Nation) “have little or no independent influence” as measured by impact on policy issues.
Data does not lie. As disturbing as the above quote may be, Kossacks need to soberly accept this finding, dial back reliance on current favored solutions, and focus on finding new fundamental solutions that can resolve the root causes of why they “have little or no independent influence.” Only then will they be able to change the system from a plutocracy to a democracy.
Evidence 2. US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, in his long quest to explain why US laws and court decisions were sliding toward whatever large corporations and their billionaire owners wanted, found the reason was:
Corporations of vast wealth and remorseless staying power have moved into our politics, to seize for themselves advantages that can be seized only by control over government.…
These forces are everywhere, and they are dominant in every area where their influence on government can be brought to bear. They are right now, as a practical matter, our unseen ruling class. When you are running for office, they can quietly back you—or your opponent—with unlimited funds,depending on how comfortable they are with how you’ll vote.
Once you’re elected and in office, corporate influence comes in the form of corporate lobbying—the behemoth on the legislative stage, drowning out all other lobbying competition by a spending ratio of more than thirty to one.
From Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy, 2017, by US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
Evidence 3. An article on The Corporate Capture of the United States in the Harvard Law School Forum reports that:
American corporations today are like the great European monarchies of yore: They have the power to control the rules under which they function and to direct the allocation of public resources.
The financial power of American corporations now controls every stage of politics — legislative, executive, and ultimately judicial. With its January 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court removed all legal restraints on the extent of corporate financial involvement in politics, a grotesque decision that can have only one effect: maximizing corporate – not national — value. Today’s CEOs have been granted the power to direct political payments and organize PAC programs to achieve objectives entirely in their own self-interest, and they have been quick to use it.
Evidence 4. The cumulative result of “the financial power of America corporations” has been to concentrate wealth (and hence power) into the hands of the wealthy few as shown in the graph.
Gains in wealth for the bottom half of the US population have been almost zero from 1960 to 2020. By contrast, gains for the top 1% and 10% are on an exponential growth curve. Wealth inequality was small in 1960. Today it’s gigantic. This explains the invincible influence the extremely rich have on the US political system, compared to average people like you and me.
How one problem is causing them all
An exponential growth curve indicates a reinforcing feedback loop is dominating system behavior. For the Money Drives Politics Problem, that loop looks like this:
Here’s how to read the loop. As high inequality of wealth and income grows, so does the power of monied special interests. As that power rises, so does the symptoms of the Money Drives Politics Problem, which are voting decisions and key government decisions that favor powerful monied special interests. This causes further increases in high inequality of wealth and income, and the loop starts over again. Each trip around the loop, such as a month in real time, causes each node in the loop to grow.
Study the Growth of Plutocracy reinforcing loop closely. It contains THE problem progressives must solve, because Money Drives Politics appears to be the cause of most or all the important problems facing progressives. Adding those problems to the diagram shows why this occurs:
I’ve tried to include most of the important problems facing progressives around the world. Every one of them arises from the Money Drives Politics Problem. Let’s explain them one problem at a time:
1. High inequality of wealth and income — As already explained, this is caused by the Money Drives Politics Problem.
2. Power of monied special interests — Caused by high inequality of wealth and income, which gives monied special interests immense power relative to the rest of the population.
3. Large recessions — The Money Drives Politics Problem is driven by large for-profit corporations and their controlling owners, the super rich. The goal of large for-profit corporations is to maximize short-term profits. That leads to economic booms and busts, which causes occasional large recessions. After each large recession some regulatory reform occurs. This is then chipped away at by the Money Drives Politics Problem, and another large recession occurs.
4. Lack of reproductive rights — Right-wing politicians essentially work for those who are driving the Money Drives Politics Problem: large for-profit corporations and the super rich. The super rich are a tiny minority. In a democracy, how can a minority persuade the majority to vote for them? A very common strategy is using political deception to convince various factions to support them via wedge issues, such as pro-life and the need to overturn Roe v. Wade, an issue centrally important to evangelical Christians.
A wedge issue is an artificially created or magnified issue designed to increase support for a politician or party, and/or fear or hatred of the opposition. An example is the way the Republican “southern strategy” of “God, guns, and gays” allowed the Republican Party to win the South from Democrats, by gaining more support from religious groups, gun lovers, and anti-gays. For more on this see The Irresistible Effectiveness of Wedge Politics.
5. Environmental unsustainability — The goal of large for-profit corporations is to maximize short-term profits. The goal of the super rich is similar: to maximize short-term income and wealth. Those goals cause the two groups to oppose anything that would reduce short-term gains. This includes solving the environmental unsustainability problem, because that’s a long-term problem where expensive action today is required to avoid cataclysmic environmental collapse decades from now.
6. Climate change — A key component of the environmental unsustainability problem is climate change, since high climate change would irreversibly destroy the global equilibrium of the biosphere. Ice cap melting, stoppage of the Gulf Stream, extinction of many species due to climate change, and so on, are irreversible. Accumulation of greenhouse gases (mostly CO2) in the atmosphere and ocean is reversible, but the cost (and side effects of the technology) is probably prohibitive. Once the world is in a weakened state due to environmental collapse (where hunger and conflict for scarce resources would prevail), there would be little extra money to spend on expensive programs like CO2 removal.
7. Poverty — High inequality of wealth and income causes many effects. See this list of effects, which includes lower health, lower social cohesion, lower happiness, higher crime, higher poverty, increased personal debt, and lower civic participation.
Why does high wealth or income inequality increase poverty? In the US the poverty rate from 1966 to 2017 hovered between 10% and 15% (source). Despite high GDP growth in the US, the poverty problem persists. Quoting from the same source:
In the United States... some of the many causes [of poverty] include income inequality, inflation, unemployment, debt traps and poor education. The majority of adults living in poverty are employed and have at least a high school education. Although the US is a relatively wealthy country by international standards, it has a persistently high poverty rate compared to other developed countries due in part to a less generous welfare system.
The reason for a “less generous welfare system” is the more income that flows to a welfare program, the higher government taxes must be to pay for the program. That increases taxes on the rich, who therefore oppose a more generous welfare system. “Cut taxes,” a common refrain from the right, really means “Give me more money by cutting government spending,” especially enforcement of business regulations that increase compliance costs and large income transfer or safety net programs, like welfare, universal health care (if the US had it), and social security.
An increase in poverty increases two other problems:
- Environmental unsustainability get worse, as poor people are forced to do things like deforestation, over-use of farmland which depletes soil fertility and causes topsoil loss, and higher numbers of children to offset higher death rates and insecurity. This closes the R4 reinforcing feedback loop, which makes the side effects of the Money Drives Politics Problem even worse. Deforestation in particular accelerates climate change, which increases poverty, which increases environmental unsustainability, which increases climate change.
- As poverty goes up, adequate people’s health and income goes down. This (along with environmental unsustainability) in turn causes the Money Drives Politics Problem to decrease, which closes the B1 balancing loop. Lower people’s health and income causes workers to be less productive and customers to buy less. This balancing loop is the reason the Growth of Plutocracy reinforcing loop cannot grow forever. There are limits.
8. Adequate people’s health and income — This is explained in the above paragraph.
9. Systemic discrimination — A rise in the Money Drives Politics Problem causes more systemic discrimination.
For example, this occurs when blacks, gays, and immigrants are fallaciously labeled as inferior or a threat to “our way of life.” This justifies large-scale discrimination, creates a wedge issue, and increases support for right-wing politicians.
“Our way of life” is code for straight white supremacy. By speaking in code about wedge issues, deceptive politicians can gain the support of some groups without alienating other groups who don’t understand the code.
An increase in systemic discrimination increases high inequality of wealth and income. One example is in 2019 the median wealth of US white families was $260,000, that of Hispanic families was $47,600, and that of Black families was $40,300 (source). A second example is the gender pay gap. In the US, women’s median hourly pay for the same work was 82% that of men. This has improved from 1982 when the gap was 65% (source).
The increase in systemic discrimination increases high inequality of wealth and income, which closes the R3 reinforcing loop. This causes the Growth of Plutocracy reinforcing loop to strengthen still more.
10. Democratic backsliding — Now we arrive at a crisis. The more that Money Drives Politics, the more democratic backsliding occurs. As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wrote earlier in The Corporate Capture of the United States:
The financial power of American corporations now controls every stage of politics —legislative, executive, and ultimately judicial.
And they want to control even more. Due to the immense power of reinforcing loops, the Growth of Plutocracy reinforcing loop allows corporate interests to have more and more control of “every stage of politics.” Over time, right-wing politicians systematically dismantle democratic institutions like fair elections, and the checks and balances of an objective fair judicial branch and an independent press. Democracy dies, and plutocracy wins.
But since The People are no longer in control, who is? If a conservative party or coalition is in control or wants control, this vacuum is frequently filled by the smartest would-be authoritarian who seizes the opportunity and quickly begins leading the right.
Hard-hitting deceptive slogans are used, like Trump’s Build the wall, Make America great again, Lock her up, Drain the swamp, They are poisoning the blood of our country (referring to immigrants), and The press is an enemy of the American people.
“They are poisoning the blood of our country” echos Hitler’s propaganda rhetoric. In his 1925 autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote "All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning."
“The press is an enemy of the American people” is the same charge other authoritarians (Stalin, Hitler, and Mao) used to denounce criticism from the press. Each called the press “enemies of the people.” This worked because:
Their goal was to delegitimize the work of the press as “fake news” and create confusion in the public mind about what’s real and what isn’t; what can be trusted and what can’t be. (source)
Delegitimizing a free and independent press erodes democracy’s checks and balances, and hastens the slide from democracy to authoritarianism.
As democratic backsliding grows, the eroded democratic system gives authoritarian politicians more authority to do anything they want. This includes demanding that supporters inject even more money into the authoritarian’s campaigns and pockets, causing the Money Drives Politics Problem to grow even worse. This closes the R2 reinforcing loop.
11. War — More democratic backsliding increases pressure for war. The more a politician leans towards authoritarianism the more they risk losing support, since they are working for themselves and the ruling elite, and not the common good. A time-tested way to solve this problem is by creating false common enemies, the bigger and more threatening the better.
The biggest threat possible is a false external enemy who threatens to destroy the country, which justifies military preparation and eventual preemptive attack, which leads to war. This is the pattern seen in Hitler’s march to World War II:
Nazi propaganda promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the [false] enemies of the Nazi Party, notably Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals.
On 13 March 1933, a Ministry of Propaganda was established, with Goebbels as its Minister. Its goals were to establish [false] enemies in the public mind: the external enemies which had imposed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, and internal enemies such as Jews, Romani, homosexuals, Bolsheviks, and cultural trends including "degenerate art". [The parallel to Fox News is not hard to see.]
For months prior to the beginning of World War II in 1939, German newspapers and leaders had carried out a national and international propaganda campaign [falsely] accusing Polish authorities of organizing or tolerating violent ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans living in Poland. On August 22, Hitler told his generals: “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.” (Source. Casus belli is an act or situation provoking or justifying war.)
The false external enemy pattern is also seen in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:
According to Putin, Russia had to eliminate the dire threat of a hostile Ukraine armed by the West and guided by a fascist ideology nurtured by the United States. Russia was “fighting fiercely for its future, repelling the aggression of neo-Nazis and their masters.” (source)
Unfortunately, once war (including civil war) breaks out, that increases poverty.
This completes review of the 11 problems caused by the Money Drives Politics Problem.
The analysis so far
Rather than race ahead with the analysis, I’m taking the time to do it right one step at a time. Most of what I’m writing is based on previous research. Some is new and applies specifically to the topic of this series of articles: Is it possible to take a more effective problem-solving approach to achieving progressive goals?
Here’s what the root cause analysis has done so far:
- Define the problem in terms of present and desired symptoms.
- Find the first intermediate cause.
- Use items 1 and 2 to create an important hypothesis: When it comes to most important progressive problems, the Money Drives Politics Problem is causing them all.
If this is of interest, we have a lot to discuss. Where is the analysis presented so far right or wrong, weak or strong? What could improve it? How does working on this problem fit into the goals and projects of the Kos community?
I’m not sure what a good way to discuss the analysis here with comments is, but I think a helpful catalyst would be a poll about the hypothesis. You can optionally explain your answer in a comment, which I (and I expect many others) would find very helpful. That should get discussion rolling….
Thanks!
The next article in the series is here.