World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [100]
Two cautions should, however, be borne in mind. First, measures that help negotiate class conflict in societies with no market-dominant minority will not necessarily have the same success in societies where class conflict is magnified by the furies of ethnic hatred. Second, not all the devices used in the West to keep “the power of numbers” from overwhelming the “power of property” would make good exports to the non-Western world. Some of them are unique to circumstances of the early modern Western nations and could not be reproduced today. Some of them are invidious and should not be reproduced today.
Disenfranchisement of the Poor
In the early stages of capitalism in all the Western nations—and precisely because the wealthy were afraid that their property might be confiscated and redistributed—the poor were expressly disenfranchised. Until relatively recently, all of the Western democracies had massive exclusions from the suffrage. To take the case of the United States, after the Federal Convention of 1787 the poor were disenfranchised in virtually every state through formal property qualifications. Although such qualifications were largely eliminated by 1860, they were typically replaced by provisions denying suffrage to the very poor: for example, through taxpaying requirements and “pauper” exclusions. Moreover, as will be discussed below, blacks in the American South, and to a lesser extent throughout the United States, were effectively disenfranchised well into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, in at least fourteen states, recipients of poor relief were deprived of the franchise as late as 1934.
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Throughout Europe, the details differ but the basic story is the same: The poor and the propertyless were for decades, sometimes centuries, explicitly denied the right to vote. In England, a statute from 1430 provided that only those adult males with “a freehold estate the annual income from which was forty shillings” could elect members of the House of Commons. Forty shillings was the amount that in 1430 supposedly would “furnish all the necessaries of life, and render the freeholder, if he pleased, an independent man.” In France, property and tax payment qualifications severely limited the franchise, even during the revolutionary period. In nineteenth-century Belgium, class domination by French speakers was perpetuated by laws limiting the vote to the propertied classes. Universal male suffrage came only in 1919.
5 The list goes on. Not only the United States, but all the Western nations had long-standing exclusions from suffrage. However repugnant, these political exclusions were arguably important to the success of the Western nations in establishing stable free market democracies.
Americans, however, have forgotten our own history. For the last twenty years the United States has been vigorously promoting instantaneous democratization—essentially overnight elections with universal suffrage—throughout the non-Western world. In doing so we are asking developing and post-Communist countries to embrace a process of democratization that no Western nation ever went through.
Capitalism Softened: The Rise of the Welfare State
As noted, in all the Western nations, and more recently Japan, the extreme wealth inequalities produced in a capitalist economy are alleviated by strong networks of redistributive institutions. The history, form, and mix of these institutions vary considerably. Generally speaking, social safety net programs have been broader, and governmental transfers larger, in Scandinavia and Western Europe than in the United States. In England, for