Politics’ Lack of Attention to the Poor as a Fundamental Problem for Democracy

It’s late in November, and I’m at my penultimate conference for the year: we’re about to begin the AANZCA 2024 conference with a remote keynote by the great Pablo Boczkowski. He starts by sharing two selfies: one, entering the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which nominated the Harris/Walz presidential ticket; that event addressed several internal and external publics, including journalists, influencers, delegates, voters, and the general public. It was characterised by an atmosphere of expectation and enthusiasm, choreographed to lead up to the actual nomination itself.

The second selfie is from fieldwork in Buenos Aires, which has the highest concentration of psychologists on the planet and serious concerns about mental health; this is exacerbated by the severe poverty crisis in the country. Here, Pablo visited a hospital named after Elvira Perón (where Diego Maradona was born) – a worn-out, crumbling place where the strains of the past decades are evident in staff and patients and poverty and inequality are a constant part of personal stories.

This gave Pablo the realisation that while the poor are omnipresent in Argentina, and indeed in the United States, they were conspicuously absent from the Democratic convention. There were plenty of references to poverty and inequality in speeches, of course, but the bulk of the economic plan focussed on uplifting the middle classes, rather than addressing endemic poverty. The poor or working poor were not addressed – and this is something that Bernie Sanders and his supporters have often pointed out about mainstream Democratic policies.

This is a substantial oversight. Food insecurity is high in the U.S., for instance, as it is in many other places around the world; it leads to a reduction of the field of the imagined, as those living in poverty are so focussed on merely surviving that it is no longer possible for them to imagine a better world. The Democrats’ constant policy focus on those who do relatively well ignores these people, and leaves them open to being addressed instead by other political forces.

This is made worse by the fact that material wealth is often tied to moral worth in the United States; this is specific to this country, and not found to a similar extent elsewhere. In Argentina, for instance, poverty is simply a fact of life, and everyone has been touched by it in some way. There is also no belief here in the magical thinking of ‘trickle-down economics’, a process for which there is very little actual proof. In the United States, by contrast, these beliefs mean that a self-proclaimed progressive party does not actually pay sufficient attention to representing, and subsequently alleviating the life conditions of, the poor.

Meanwhile, conservatives in both countries have been courting such voters, even though in power the policies they implement only worsen the material conditions experienced by the poor. Progressive tend to ignore and even deny class as a category; this ignorance is a remarkable achievement given the ubiquitous visibility of poverty in the United States and elsewhere today, and a fundamental flaw in these democratic systems. To see what is not seen, to represent what is not represented, and to develop approaches to address them is a crucial challenge, not least also for scholarship in relevant fields. Only if we do so does this problem of democracy have a fighting chance of being resolved.