Is American Democracy Slowly Dying?

This blog was stimulated by an interview with Jon Meachem on NPR, July 4, 2017.  In this interview, Meacham referred to Richard Reeves who states that the American Dream is working for only about 20 percent of the population---the rich and upper middle class---but it is stagnating or declining for about 80 percent of the American population.  This has been going on for about 40 years, gradually getting worse over time.

Jon Meachem:  American democracy is "in the most danger it's been in since the 1930s."  The rich and upper middle class "is rigging the market---the housing market, the college market---essentially hoarding the American Dream."  "the idea of America as the land of opportunity is ending."

Could we be in a downward death spiral with the American Trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism, and hyperethnocentrism leading the way.  Or is American democracy strong enough to recover from its downward slide?

Over the holiday, I learned that in spite of the Declaration of Independence beautiful phrase "All men are created equal" the slave population multiplied from 400,000 in 1776 to 4,000,000 by the time of the Civil War.  America did not practice what it preached.

In 1990, Republican Kevin Phillips published a book titled The Politics of Rich and Poor in which he addressed the explosion of the dominance of the rich over the poor; the wealth gap doubled during the 1980s---the Reagan era.  Since the 1980s under both Republican and Democratic presidents, the wealth gap has continued to widen.

Trumpism is symtomatic, not causal.  Trumpism may speed the decline of democracy, but it began its decline decades earlier.  Hillbilly Elegy documents this decline and the despair of one segment of our white population which is now being ravaged by the opioid epidemic.