Wealth Inequality Is Deepening the Distance Between Americans and Democracy

Economic inequality threatens democracy, Xochitl Gonzalez argues, by shaping both whether people feel able to participate and whether powerful interests benefit from undemocratic arrangements. Treating inequality as a distant economic problem, she warns, risks pushing the country further toward autocracy, perhaps irrevocably.

Gonzalez says financially struggling Americans may see politics—and democracy itself—as secondary or irrelevant. That distance helps explain, in her account, why many lower-income Americans do not participate in democracy, and why those who do often support authoritarian-leaning figures. It is easy to judge someone for voting based on the price of eggs when you know where your next meal is coming from, she says. For someone unsure of that meal, the stakes look different.

She points to researchers’ findings of a recurring correlation between economic inequality, democratic decline and the rise of strongman leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Senegal and the Philippines. Those leaders promise to solve working people’s problems, often by sowing divisions and blaming an “other.” Gonzalez adds that precarity also correlates with increases in racism and xenophobia.

Gonzalez compares today’s billionaires with the Gilded Age’s robber barons and post-Soviet Russia’s oligarchs: groups she says can live above the law and exchange donations for business monopolies and government contracts. She says billionaires, like the financially struggling, can see benefits in autocracy, though for different reasons.

A declined card while buying coffee brought Xochitl Gonzalez to tears, even though the problem was temporary and she had other cards in her purse. She described a tightened chest and clenched jaw, a reaction rooted less in her current circumstances than in earlier periods of living paycheck to paycheck: working through college in 1998 and trying to keep a small business afloat during the 2009 recession.

The incident made her ask how having money—or not having it—shapes behavior, thought and political choices. In her year of research into the sociology and psychology of class, she found that social class is more than income or homeownership. She says a person’s class of origin can shape identity nearly as much as race, gender or sexuality. Children become aware of their social class a little later than they become aware of race and gender; by age seven, she says, they can identify another person’s social class with striking accuracy from a photograph.

Gonzalez also connects financial anxiety to health. She recalled that her Oura ring identified unusual stress on the day she could not pay for coffee, suggesting work and poor sleep as possible reasons but not money. She said financial anxiety in America is linked to hypertension, depression and reduced lifespan.

Gonzalez contrasts children raised with resources, whose basic needs are met and whose parents can focus on helping them thrive, with children raised in scarcity, for whom security is less certain. For the well-resourced child, agency and individual choices can become expressions of identity: extracurricular activities, college, career and even political affiliation. Her shorthand is Neo in The Matrix, whose hero’s journey begins with a choice between the red and blue pills.

For children raised in scarcity—nearly 40 percent of children in America today, according to Gonzalez—a landlord or unexpected medical bill can throw life into a tailspin. In that context, she says, the world can feel beyond one’s control. Security may be found in groups, and staying true to who one is in the face of adversity may matter more than individual agency. She invokes John McClane in Die Hard, who does not seek trouble but fights for his wife and the law he vowed to defend.

The distinction is not just about personality. Gonzalez says people with similar circumstances often live, work, worship and socialize together. Their different views can harden into class cultures with different ideas of what good governance and leadership look like.

Xochitl Gonzalez says the distance between class cultures has grown as wealth has concentrated. She notes that the top 1 percent of households has accrued as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. The middle class, which she describes as having served as “cartilage between bone,” has thinned.

Gonzalez describes that “comfort class” as people who may not look rich on paper but have the security of a family safety net. They often hold mid-pay, high-prestige jobs that influence American culture and policy. She calls the resulting divide a kind of class apartheid, in which a small group with generational wealth controls a society it does not fully understand.

Politicians, staffers and consultants often come from backgrounds in which money affords a sense of agency and control, Gonzalez says. That can lead them to overestimate their influence on politics and the power of their supporters’ votes. Donors unfamiliar with the physical panic that need can induce may focus on social issues and back candidates who mirror their values.

A college memory shows how differently people can read the same event. Gonzalez once splurged on an Italian meal with an upper-middle-class roommate and carefully packed up her leftovers. When the roommate ate the eggplant parmesan overnight, Gonzalez was furious. To her roommate, it was an inconsiderate late-night snack; to Gonzalez, it was a meal she had already paid for and planned to stretch into the next day.

Gonzalez’s prescription is both political and social: support candidates who buttress the working and middle classes, and cultivate empathy beyond one’s own socioeconomic circle. It is easy to rail online at strangers, she says, and harder to ignore the problems of friends and neighbors.