{"content":[{"text":"The future of democracy in America - Defence Viewpoints from UK Defence Forum \n Wednesday, 10 October 2012 00:01","bbox":{"left":0.076183,"top":0.013031,"width":0.723903,"height":0.035087}},{"text":"<p>In an essay based on the new updated edition of his book America Right or Wrong: An \n Anatomy of American Nationalism, which was published in September 2012 by Oxford \n University Press, Anatol Lieven argues that the Tea Parties in America draw their strength not \n only from the current economic crisis but also from their deep roots in the American tradition. \n With the economic and demographic decline of the White middle classes likely to continue \n indefinitely, he sees this radical conservative tendency as posing a serious threat to the \n effectiveness of US government and even to the future of US democracy.</p> <p><br />The \n US Tea Party movement as such may have passed its peak; but its soul will go marching on \n through the Republican Party. This in turn will mean that the tendency that the Tea Parties \n represent will be able to go on blocking any US economic and social policy of which they \n disapprove. As Kate Zernicke of the New York Times has argued in her book Boiling Mad: \n Inside Tea Party America, \"if the Tea Party might never run things, it was never going to be \n defeated either.\"<br /><br />For while most opinion polls put Tea Party support at 20 per cent of \n the population at most, to block not just legislation in the USA you do not need a democratic \n majority. The US Constitution gives even the minority party in the Senate enormous powers to \n block not just legislation but also executive actions of which they disapprove. A committed 20 \n per cent of the electorate is more than enough to dominate the Republican Party and to achieve \n this blocking role in the legislature.<br /><br />As a result, whether Obama or Romney wins in \n November, US economic policy will remain largely paralysed, and reform of America's \n government impossible. This is not good news, at a time when the US and world economies are \n in such trouble, and when the rise of China is facing America with a challenge the like of which it \n has never encountered in its history. Moreover, deep underlying social, economic and \n demographic trends in the USA make it highly unlikely that American radical conservatism � \n whatever form it takes - will weaken in the years to come.<br /><br />When Tea Party \n supporters speak of the people they represent as the historical backbone of the USA and US \n democracy, they have a point. In the end, in most countries around the world democracy has \n stood or fallen according to the strength, the values and the loyalty of those groups called in \n America \"middle class\" (which include what in Europe would in the past have been called upper \n working class). The alienation of large sections of these classes from the political elites and the \n system of government, as demonstrated by the Tea Party movement, is deeply worrying.<br \n /><br />The power of the Tea Parties reflects both the gathering crisis of the US middle classes \n and the old cultural lineage of radical conservatism in America. Far from being simply a specific \n response to the Obama administration and to the post-2008 recession, they are only the latest \n in a series of radical conservative movements which have emerged in recent decades; and \n these in turn stem from a populist tradition which is much older still.<br /><br />The \n conservative populist movements of the past generation stem largely from a decline in the \n economic and social status of the white lower middle classes and working classes which has \n been gathering pace for more than three decades, and which has accelerated sharply over the \n past five. The most worrying aspect of US decline is the increasing middle class economic \n hardship that is helping drive the Tea Party movement and increasing its hysteria. Stagnation of \n middle class incomes has now been gathering pace for almost four decades. Since 2008, it has \n become a steep decline. Compared to the decades before the Great Depression and from the \n 1940s to the 1970s, most individual middle class and working class incomes from the 1970s to \n 2008 stagnated or fell. By 2009, the US male median wage had dropped 28 per cent in real \n terms since 1970. Since 2007, median household income has fallen by almost 10 per cent.<br \n /><br />This has been a truly shattering fall, which was only made bearable for a while by the","bbox":{"left":0.071899,"top":0.087836,"width":0.8559929999999999,"height":0.824573}},{"text":"1 / 8","bbox":{"left":0.885489,"top":0.952395,"width":0.026152000000000064,"height":0.015203999999999995}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}