Elections are supposed to give us choices. We can reward incumbents or we can throw the bums out. We can choose Republicans or Democrats. We can choose conservative policies or progressive ones.
In most elections, however, we don’t get a say in something important: whether we’re governed by the rich. By Election Day, that choice has usually been made for us. Would you like to be represented by a millionaire lawyer or a millionaire businessman? Even in our great democracy, we rarely have the option to put someone in office who isn’t part of the elite.
That’s my Sanford School colleague Nick Carnes, writing in yesterday’s New York Times.
Nick is a political scientist whose research focuses American politics. White-Collar Government, his book on social class and politics, is forthcoming and is based on the doctoral dissertation he wrote at Princeton.