This comes at a time when China is expanding and modernizing its military, particularly its navy, and is pressing claims of sovereignty-and exclusive and exclusionary authority-over its three littoral seas: the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea.īut it is not the short run that interests us most. defense spending, in turn casting doubt on American military capabilities and credibility. Also from their perspective, it has the potential to force substantial reductions in U.S. economic debacle has discredited the “Washington Consensus” and produced extraordinary partisan polarization and policy paralysis in the U.S political system, thus casting useful (from the Chinese perspective) doubts on the American democratic model. Of particular importance, the Chinese political elite appears to have drawn the conclusion that the economic crisis of America and its allies may be producing a tipping point in the distribution of power and leadership in world affairs. leadership in the world and that it is now beginning to weaken the projection of U.S. In the short run, it is clear enough that the current global economic crisis has seriously diminished U.S. foreign policy and America’s place in world affairs. This essay takes up the question of how plutocracy might affect U.S. The American Interest essays dealt extensively with both the causes and the consequences of plutocracy, with a particular focus on the consequences for the economy and for democracy. It is not surprising then, that the idea of plutocracy has made a comeback in this, the third Gilded Age of American history which, like the first two, produced economic catastrophe in its wake. The concept, which became popular during the first Gilded Age in the 1880s, and was revived for use in second such age in the 1920s, described the sharp increase in inequality and massive concentration of wealth and income that occurred in the United States during those eras.
#Countries with plutocracy series#
A recent series of articles in the January/February 2011 issue of The American Interest analyzed at length and in detail how the once prevalent idea of plutocracy might help us to better understand contemporary circumstances. Given the depth and gravity of our current crisis, it is not surprising that certain ideas and terms from those earlier eras should now reappear in analyses and discussions about public affairs. The current Great Recession is comparable in depth and gravity to the Great Stagflation of the 1970s, and in some ways it has become similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s or the earlier deep economic crisis of the 1890s, which in its time was also called “The Great Depression.” It seems that major global economic crises come along about every forty years. The United States and indeed the entire Western world are now in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in many decades.
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