Also relevant: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page. This is not news, you say. Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it: Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power. Chomsky mentioned this many times before, here for example.The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.
This is, of course, a tautology. History, the only arbiter of truth, reminds us that when someone rises up and ousts the rich and powerful elite, their next step is to make themselves the rich and powerful elite.The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
Sure. Although history has its own arbiters. Which coincidentally doesn't include those so poor and powerless that their version is not heard. Our modern version of democratic states is supposed to curb the relationship between wealth and influence on political decision making. Showing empirically that the system is a functional plutocracy implies a serious lack of political legitimization in any narrative which is still formally democratic. It's true that in a well developed plutocracy like ours, removing one group of plutocrats only replaces them with another group, which was your original point. Yet the mainstream consensus as suggested by mainstream media still implies the existence of a functional (not just formal) democracy. That makes the findings discussed here quite relevant to every informed political discourse.