The Dark Future for America If We Let the Middle Class Disappear

In other words, he recognized Hobbes was wrong, and that the "natural state of man" gave him a voice and the power to use it.

It turns out that the Founders knew something Hobbes didn't: political democracy and an economic middle class is the natural state of humankind. Indeed, it's the natural state of the entire animal kingdom. Biologists used to think animal societies were ruled by alpha males. Recent studies have found that while it's true alpha males (and females, in some species) have the advantage in courtship rituals, that's where their power ends. Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt discovered that animals don't follow a leader, but instead move together.

James Randerson did a followup study with red deer to prove the point. How does a herd of deer decide it's time to stop grazing and go toward the watering hole? As they're grazing, various deer point their bodies in seemingly random directions, until it comes time to go drink. Then individuals begin to graze while facing one of several watering holes. When a majority of deer are pointing toward one particular watering hole, they all move in that direction. Randerson saw instances where the alpha deer was actually one of the last to move toward the hole rather than one of the first.

When I interviewed Tim Roper about his research at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, he told me that when his findings were first published, scientists from all over the world called to tell him they were seeing the same thing with their research subjects. Birds flying in flocks aren't following a leader but monitoring the motions of those around them for variations in the flight path; when more than 50 percent have moved in a particular direction -- even if it's only a quarter-inch in one direction or another -- the entire flock veers off that way. It's the same with fish and even swarms of gnats. Roper said his colleagues were telling him that from ants to gorillas, democracy is the norm among animals.

Just like with indigenous human societies -- which have had hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error to work out the best ways to live -- democracy is the norm among animals, and (other than for the Darwinian purpose of finding the best mate) hierarchy/kingdom is the rarity.

Thus, we discover, this close relationship between the middle class and democracy is burned into our DNA, along with that of the entire animal kingdom. In a democracy there may be an elite (like the alpha male deer), but they don't rule the others. Instead the group is ruled by the vast middle -- what in economic terms we would call a middle class.

A true democracy both produces a middle class and requires a middle class for survival. Like the twin strands of DNA, democracy and the middle class are inextricably intertwined, and to break either is to destroy the viability of both.

In human society as well, to have a democracy we must have a middle class. And to have a true middle class, a majority of the people in a nation must be educated and economically secure and must have full and easy access to real news so they can make informed decisions. Democracy requires that its citizens be able to afford to take care of themselves and their families when they get sick, to afford a decent place to live, to find meaningful and well-paying work, and to anticipate, and enjoy, a secure retirement.

This is the American Dream. It's the America my dad grew up in and the America I grew up in. It's the America that is quickly slipping away from us under the burden of crony capitalism and a political system corrupted by it.

When there is no American Dream, when there is no middle class, there cannot be real democracy. That's why when elections are brought to nations that are in crisis or that don't have a broad, stable, well-educated middle class -- such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian territories -- the result is aristocrats, "strongmen," or theocrats exploiting those elections as a way of gaining decidedly undemocratic power.

America's Founders understood the relationship between the middle class -- what Thomas Jefferson called the yeomanry -- and democracy. Jefferson's greatest fear for the young American nation was not a new king but a new economic aristocracy. He worried that if a small group of citizens became too wealthy -- if America became polarized between the very rich and the very poor -- democracy would vanish.

Our democracy depends upon our ability to play referee to the game of business and to protect labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson insisted, to control "overgrown wealth" from becoming "dangerous to the state," which is, so long as we are a democratic republic, We the People.

When wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few and the middle class shrinks to the point where it's no longer a politically potent force, democracy becomes a feudal aristocracy: the rule of the elite. As Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out in 1936, the rule of the many requires that We the People have a degree of economic as well as political freedom. When We the People are given the opportunity to educate ourselves, earn a living wage, own our own homes, and feel confident that we have good child care, health care and care in our old age -- in short, when America has a thriving middle class -- America also has a thriving democracy.

It's time to restore that thriving middle class to its former glory. But, we must correct the sins of our past and make certain that economic opportunity in our nation is not reserved solely for the white, male population. We need a middle class that is open to all Americans, so that each of us has the individual freedom and power to participate in the process and shape this country's freedom.

If we don't fight for the programs that protect and restore our middle class to its former glory and beyond, we may as well kiss our democracy goodbye.