World Media Ethics by Robert S. Fortner P. Mark Fackler

Author:Robert S. Fortner,P. Mark Fackler [Fackler, P. Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118990001
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2016-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

The philosophy of this new form of democracy is “that those living in market-based societies should not expect the kind of social justice or equity in the marketplace that socialists and liberal progressives demand. The argument instead is that this should not be expected of market-based societies. Instead, the capitalist marketplace – as the preeminent rationalized articulation of the modern human condition – is designed to allow the entrepreneurially astute individuals to successfully achieve security, prosperity, and profit, while those less capable in this context fall behind and must take responsibility on themselves to improve their condition” (Ibid., p. 44). The result for people in the United States: “substantial levels of social exclusion, including high levels of income inequality, high relative and absolute poverty rates, poor and unequal outcomes, poor health outcomes, and high rates of crime and incarceration” (Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, 2006, quoted by Rosow and George, 2015, p. 50).

The United States, as the country currently with the largest gross domestic product on the planet, exports this philosophy to other countries, including nascent democracies that often restrict participation in non-economic ways for the political purposes of their own prevailing elites. This occurs through the demands made by the World Bank, the InterAmerican and other development banks, the International Monetary Fund, and in Europe, the European Union and the Eurozone (promoted primarily by Germany as the continent's largest economy). So, when countries' economies falter and they seek assistance from such transnational organizations, it is their demands that determine levels of public spending, investments in infrastructure, education, health and welfare services – not the will of the people themselves whose active participation in democratic fora might otherwise be solicited by their political representatives. This not only strains the resources of civil society, but makes its objections on behalf of social justice or moral commitment largely irrelevant. This is then what Robert Dahl calls managed democracy, or polyarchy:

Put simply, polyarchy refers to a system in which a small group actually rules, and mass participation in decision making is confined to leadership choice in elections managed by competing elites. It is, in this sense, rule by an elite with “democratic” characteristics, in which democratic participation is limited to the electoral process and the simple act of choosing between elites every few years. More significantly, the polyarchic notion of democracy does not acknowledge the significance of economic equality as integral to democracy.

(Rosow and George, 2015, p. 53)

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