[keernan]

I'm no historian, but has there ever been a society in world history that wasn't dominated by a 'privileged few'?

Weren't the 'rules' of the United States of America written by wealthy white males who excluded women, non-whites, and the non-wealthy (eg non-land owning) from participating in the new nation?

As much as the worldwide turn to fascism worries me, I don't see the lives of most people in the world changing very drastically from any other time in history. Maybe the openness by which the privileged exercise their power is a bit higher on the historical scale, but the lives of the non-privileged, world wide, really don't change much over history. Sure, the invention of fire, electricity, etc benefitted all of mankind, but the distinctions of 'how life is lived' between the privileged and the non-privileged has always been dramatic.

[lunar-whitey]

The United States from 1945 to about 1970 made a fair amount of noise about broadening the scope of the franchise. This certainly was not the norm historically, but contemporary ambivalence about that project is what leads us to this article today.