One Hell of a To-Do List for Saving Democracy

Here’s how we defeat economic inequality and political alienation

✍︎Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

French economist Thomas Piketty used a century’s worth of data to show two terrifying things:

1. The return on capital is higher than overall economic growth, so the rich tend to get richer and society becomes increasingly unequal over time.
2. Only one thing quickly and reliably reduces inequality: war (or its near-relative and frequent progenitor, revolution).

Can our finance-driven, globalized hypercapitalism be tamed enough to make it compatible with democracy? Maybe. If we don’t figure out how, we’ll lose our comfortable Western democracies and the already shaky international liberal order they both model and support. We have maybe 20 years to save democracy and secure a progressive planetary order for the next century or two.

In my previous piece, I showed how we’ve tackled medium-sized clusterfucks, like acid rain or HIV/AIDS, using focused action on multiple fronts over a decade or more.

We need to apply that problem-solving skill to the systemic threat facing democracy.

Democracy’s two extinction-level threats in the United States and the UK are…