Voices
And that is why 2013 was the
year the revolt against the plutocrats began. Make no mistake —
this is a powerful and consequential political moment, which is
being felt across the western industrial democracies and whose
impact is only beginning.
You see it in the U.S. in the
election of Bill de Blasio as mayor
of New York, and, just as significant, his blessing by the Clintons
at his inauguration; in California
Governor Jerry Brown’s successful tax increase on the rich; in the
emergence of Elizabeth Warren as
one of her party’s leaders; and in
the despair of leading Republican
thinkers, like Frank Luntz, who believe the left has won the national
argument on income inequality.
You see it in France in the new
75 percent tax on the super-rich.
You see it even in Switzerland,
long the discrete home of the
world’s money, which has passed
a law giving shareholders a binding vote on CEO compensation.
For anyone who cares about
democracy — and that should be
all of us — this populist backlash is deeply reassuring. One
of the big fears prompted by the
economic rise of the plutocrats
was that they would inevitably
CHRYSTIA
FREELAND
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
capture political power, too. It
is, after all, hard to disagree with
Louis Brandeis’s warning, at the
height of America’s first Gilded
Age, that “we can have democracy in this country, or we can
In democracies, the
electoral math is ultimately
denominated in demographics
not bank balances.”
have great wealth concentrated
in the hands of a few, but we
can’t have both.”
Today, Brandeis may again be
turning out to be right, but not
in the way he had feared: rising
plutocratic economic might has
certainly led to an attempt to
gain political sway, but it isn’t
working very well. Instead, the
plebes are fighting back.
There’s an arithmetic inevitability to what’s happening —
money can buy political voice
and encourage the cognitive capture of the political elite. But in
democracies, the electoral math
is ultimately denominated in
demographics not bank balances.
Any politically free system which
cannot economically deliver for