Who Rules America Analysis

The government in the United States supposedly revolves around American ideals such as equality and diversity; however, this is simply not the case. The meaning of democracy has been skewed in the United States to represent something entirely different than it did in 1776 when the country was founded. Today, our democracy behaves more like an aristocracy, where the upper class exercises power within the government and state, influencing discourse and therefore the laws and resources in our country, purportedly “for the people”. Democracy is presumed to provide everyone with equal political power, but the government in today’s America, although seemingly following this ideal model, does not. Instead, the elite upper-class have a monopoly over

Those two axes of inequality mask the social classes within culture, because if there had been no distinctions between race and gender in class structures, “class or socioeconomic differences would have been more obvious” as Robert Dahl explains in Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City (Dahl 54). This paper will mainly focus on the class aspect of inequality within government, keeping race and gender in mind while continuing forward. Social class, as George Domhoff introduces in Who Rules America?, started in the colonial and revolutionary times, and therefore contains deep roots in the foundation and history of the United States. Leaders “who did not fight for equality accepted it in order to win” not taking into account slaves and native Americans, but the class inequality of white men (Domhoff 15). Americans took pride in a smaller class distinction than Europe, and thus ignored the great class distinction that was present, further allowing those class inequalities to permeate throughout American culture and discretely form an aristocracy model of government under the democratic illusion. Dennis Gilbert in The American Class Structure In an Age of Growing Inequality expands on this theme

As Andrew Jackson once said, “many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress”. This fits the classism model, or the systematic oppression of subordinated class groups to advantage and strengthen the dominant class groups, the lower class’ injustices allowing the upper class to thrive and be bettered. The elite’s mindset that they are more important than the average citizen allows them to hold the idea that they deserve more rights or protection than the average citizen as well. Huston expands on this application while expounding on the political economy of aristocracy, advancing that “in lands characterized by political monopoly, rulers, monarchs, or aristocrats used governmental policies to enrich themselves and their retainers, thus producing a maldistribution of wealth” (Huston 1089). This political monopoly model holds true in America today with the upper class taking advantage of governmental processes to better themselves above regular tax-paying citizens with the idea that they are deserving of it. James Huston again validates this reasoning by stating “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes” (Huston 1098).