Polarized Democracies

The concentration of income in a few hands, a phenomenon that increasingly overwhelms the United State for the past four decades, has made American democracy the most unequal amongst developed countries. Billionaires accumulate fabulous fortunes within a society where millions of their countrymen have huge difficulties finding a small acceptable welfare.

The fatal combination of wealth for a few and despair for many places the world’s biggest power far from the ideal democratic equality that expands in a society where opportunities are finally a concrete reality for all.

The solution to this jumble of inequalities doesn’t seem close to the horizon, since it deals with an essentially political phenomenon. Social polarization feeds from an unprecedented political polarization, characterized by the inability to arrange and agree on the necessary policies to resolve the great challenges that they face, such as the inequality in education.

The current inability to build a consensus among the major parties on the actions to take is due to, according to what economist Paul Krugman outlined recently in the New York Times, the dysfunction that the Republican Party generates conquered by extreme sectors that don’t recognize the legitimacy of political opposition. Under that premise, cooperation seems very difficult since the national interest is relegated, in part by one of the political parties dominated by money and influence in the sector that concentrates incomes, to the imposition of their own agenda and their triumph in the political arena.

The costs involved in polarization in a democracy, when a political system is paralyzed and harassed by a sector that tries to impose its agenda at the expense of the general welfare, it is exactly the subject which ex-president Jimmy Carter referred to in his book, Our Endangered Values. Carter was one of the first politicians that indicated, in 2005, the consequences that a polarized democracy would have for welfare and coexisting in harmony — it could block the possibility of facing the country’s most pressing problems together.

Experience seems to indicate, then, that in a democracy that doesn’t polarize political coexistence leaves room for consensus building, which enables major momentum, strengthening and enhancing of long-term public policies needed for the general welfare. An example of this can be seen in the social policy in Brazil, originally conceived and propelled by Cardoso’s administration and continued and strengthened by Lula and now Dilma.

In our region, which has the sad record of being the most unequal in the planet and that has already approved the bitter taste of misunderstanding and division, are emerging democracies that move far from political polarization to a virtuous political dynamic where poverty and inequality, our biggest challenges, are increasingly reduced.