Chomsky and America's Capitalist Democracy Ceiling

What is the ceiling of America's capitalist democracy? According to Noam Chomsky, the ceiling has lowered considerably since it peaked in 1949. In his article "The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy," he explores the present ceiling level of America's capitalist democracy. He writes,

According to received doctrine, we live in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite some flaws. There’s been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won’t be pursuing this because I’d like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy”, RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked” by accident. To begin with, how does RECD compare with democracy? Well that depends on what we mean by “democracy”. There are several versions of this. One, there is a kind of received version. It’s soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety, patriotic speeches, what children are taught in school, and so on. In the U.S. version, it’s government “of, by and for the people”. And it’s quite easy to compare that with RECD.

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