Extractive American Politics: Considering Democratic Costs

• In Event: Democracy and Governance from above and Below: Vulnerability and Possibility

Abstract

In this era of rapid climate change, American reliance on extraction as a central source of value creation has come increasingly into question. Concerns about externalities like pollution and increased emissions are central points of contestation among environmental activists. Similarly, political economists have long traced how extractive industries tend toward corruption, often undercutting democratic governance along the way. However, systems that deplete natural resources are not the only extractive force shaping contemporary American democracy. Rather I argue in this essay that extraction also exists as a political ethos that prioritizes the accumulation of private profit over the needs of existing communities. I theorize a system of extraction that relies on the siphoning of collective resources into reserves of private coffers through (often unseen) policy regimes, which is at work in American political institutions. Crucially, this process need not be explicitly tied to material practices of extracting resources. Creating lucrative tax rewards for firms or the transferral of public utility management to private-sector actors, for example, removes social resources that might otherwise be collectively managed, harming democratic institutions in the process. Thus I show how an increasing trend toward extractive governance, not just extractive material practices, has steep democratic costs, by cordoning off many areas or resources of American life from democratic deliberation. To accurately take stock of the country’s democratic health, this submerged form of extractive governance must be understood; to that end I offer a preliminary theory of extraction as a growing threat to contemporary American democracy. I conclude by considering some policies that might limit extractive governance’s democratic costs, namely through broadened public oversight in decision making and meaningful regulation of private interests that are entangled in the governing process.

Author

• Grace E Reinke, University of New Orleans