Susan Stokes
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Susan Stokes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So there's a phenomenon around the world, which we call democratic erosion or democratic backsliding, where people elect a prime minister or a president who then undermines their own democracies, badmouthing the press, undermining the independence of the courts, and undermining confidence in elections and so on.
And those kinds of leaders are more prone to be elected, more prone to be in power in democracies where income is very, very polarized, very unequal.
It's hard to have accountability when there are, in reality, people whose wealth is so vast that they can protect themselves from accountability.
Of course, if they commit crimes, it's always the possibility that they will be prosecuted and so forth.
But the reality is that
Great wealth tends to translate into protection, a lack of accountability.
20 or 25 of the most wealthy individuals have the wealth at the equivalent of half of the American population.
So that's an enormous level of income inequality.
The level of income inequality in the United States today makes us look much more like Brazil than France.
Those gaps are wide and they've become wider.
And again, this is not just the U.S., the wealth gaps.
which we generally measure with something called the Gini Index, those wealth gaps have grown since about the 1980s in many advanced industrial countries.
But the gaps have become more gaping in the U.S.
than in many other countries because, in part, we do less to use our tax system and social policy to close those gaps.
So it's harder and harder for people to see their way
A lot of Americans just barely getting by to even a sort of stable middle class existence, much less thinking about moving from the middle class to a kind of affluent class.
And unfortunately, the impact of the very wealthy on democratic politics, it goes in different directions.
But many of the very wealthy are somewhat hostile toward inclusion, toward participation, people who they view as much less confident than themselves and are sometimes openly hostile toward democracy itself.
It's very important.
And of course, those two things sort of go together.
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