Why economic inequality is the biggest threat to democracy | Sally Kohn

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Writer and communication strategist Sally Kohn went looking for an answer to a question that's been keeping a lot of people up at night. Why is authoritarianism on the rise around the world? She expected to learn what the strong men, so to speak, might be getting right. Instead, nearly everyone she interviewed told her she was asking the wrong question entirely.

**Sally Kohn** (0:32)
Authoritarianism wasn't surging because of anything it was doing right, but because of what democracy was getting wrong.

**Elise Hu** (0:41)
In this talk, Sally makes the case that we've long treated democracy and economic opportunity as two separate things, and that this is exactly the mistake we can't afford to make anymore. What weakens democracy, she says, is the failure to understand and deliver results for people's actual lives, right down to their wallets.

**Sally Kohn** (0:59)
If democracy doesn't deliver meaningful economic opportunity, democracy starts to feel meaningless. And that makes authoritarianism and other forms of government more attractive, not in and of themselves, but by default.

**Elise Hu** (1:18)
In the end, Sally answers another important question. What and who is democracy really for? That is coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Sally Kohn** (1:42)
250 years ago. Just under a mile from here, Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the most consequential documents in American history. Now, the Declaration of Independence wasn't perfect. Just like the guy who wrote it in the country it created weren't perfect either. But it set us on this path, right? This beautiful, audacious, complicated path that's still evolving. And the Declaration of Independence still gives me chills. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's good, right? Did you get chills?
I mean, yeah, I changed it a little, okay, from all men are created equal to all are created equal, because it makes it better, right? Thank you. And that's the point I want to talk with you about today, that to live up to its promise, we have evolved democracy in the past, and it needs to evolve again. Not only so that we can feel our votes count, but so we can count democracy's real benefits in our lives, including in our wallets. So a couple of years ago, a philanthropic foundation in the United States asked me to do some research to find out why authoritarianism was gaining ground around the globe. So I interviewed civic leaders in West Africa and scholars in Eastern Europe and democracy leaders in Latin America, and I asked them, what's authoritarianism getting so right? These leaders that are pushing people and places away from democracy, what are these authoritarians doing that's so effective? Pretty much everyone I talked to said I was asking the wrong question, that authoritarianism wasn't surging because of anything it was doing right, but because of what democracy was getting wrong.
That stopped me in my tracks. The way they put it, authoritarianism was like an opportunistic disease that could only take root when democracy was weak. And in case you haven't been paying attention, this is where democracy is kind of on life support. So according to Freedom House, only about 20% of the world's population lives in a country currently that can be considered free. And dissatisfaction with democracy is rising worldwide in the US, for instance. About three out of five Americans say they are currently dissatisfied with how democracy is working. Why? The answer came from a conversation I had with Quasi Prempé. So Quasi runs the Ghana Center for Democratic Development. Now Ghana only won independence from colonial rule in 1957 So not that long ago, but long enough that most people in Ghana today don't remember a time before democracy. But what they do know is that they're struggling economically right now under democracy. And so as Quasi put it, they very understandably ask, what has democracy done for me lately?
His point is that democracies that do not deliver broad-based opportunity are vulnerable to autocratic capture. And research backs this up. So Susan Stokes is a political science professor at the University of Chicago. She has looked at variables for why democracy erodes in some countries, but not others. Income inequality is the overwhelming variable in democratic backsliding, so much so that Stokes said short of unplugging their computers, they couldn't make it go away. Now, I want to be really clear about something. In the richest country in the world, a country that boasts about being a land of opportunity for all, ensuring meaningful economic opportunity for all is the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do, and that is enough of a reason to do it. And, it's practical.