FDR, QUOTING AN OLD ENGLISH JUDGE, liked to say that “necessitous men are not free men.” That is to say, if I control your access to the basic necessities of life, and in particular if I use that control to influence your behavior in ways that touch upon politics, can you really be said to be free?

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, of Princeton University and Northwestern University, respectively, have published a paper that has generated quite a bit of buzz in the last few days. The conclusions of “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” are both provocative and, for those who value democratic traditions, deeply worrying:

“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”

What they are saying is that as a practical matter, American democracy is dead, or at least on life support. It gives me no joy to say that I agree with their assessment.

I’ve been saying since this column’s inception that capitalism, absent robust restraints, concentrates wealth upward, but I’ve concentrated most of my words here on the economic consequences of that tendency. Gilens’s and Page’s paper deals more directly with the political consequences, and that’s what I would like to discuss in today’s column.

They write: “Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.”

These are important questions, and I agree with their conclusion that the vast bulk of American citizens have little to no power. While acknowledging that policies sometimes reflect the will of the majority, they posit that this mostly occurs because those policies do not conflict with the interests of the elites:

“(T)he preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”

I can think of many examples of this in recent American legislative history. For example, a majority of Americans — including a majority of Republican voters – favors increasing the minimum wage, yet Congress has sent no bill to the president’s desk for his signature. A large majority of Americans say that the federal government ought to prioritize taking action to revive the economy over deficit reduction, yet deficit reduction is the only policy that has actually happened. In fact, deficit reduction in a weak economy actually leads to further weakness, which slows tax collection, which adds to the deficit.

Moving away from the dry and careful language of Gilens’s and Page’s paper to some plain speaking: The American political system has become seriously corrupted at every level by the concentration of economic power in the hands of powerful and increasingly unaccountable elites. This has been abetted by a pair of Supreme Court decisions on campaign finance regulations that have only increased the power of wealthy Americans: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which found among other things that money equals speech, and, earlier this month, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which removed some of the remaining limits on campaign contributions.

If we’re looking for an explanation for why popular policies that elites don’t like seem to languish in Congress, I think we have our answer: The people who finance the campaigns of both parties won’t agree to them.

If money is speech, then the rich will always have the loudest voice in the conversation, and the richer the rich are relative to everyone else, the truer that will be.

If we are to restore government “of the people, by the people and for the people” in the United States, I think it is time to seriously consider public financing of campaigns — and there is a way to do it that would not run afoul of recent Supreme Court decisions. Simply match every dollar given to one candidate with a dollar given to his opponents. Corporations and wealthy individuals could give as much as they want to any candidate, but would know that extra dollars don’t equal extra influence.

None of this will happen, of course, unless we citizens demand it — and in terms that cannot be ignored by the Washington establishment.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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