There’s this graph that I found recently. It’s the most unsettling graph I’ve seen in American politics in a very, very, very long time. Yet it’s really boring to look at it. It’s just a nearly straight, horizontal line. The line doesn’t do anything interesting at all.

But what the graph shows is somewhat terrifying. The line is showing the relationship between what the average voter wants and what they actually get.

In a huge study looking at over 2000 surveys of people’s policy opinions, whether people were on the left side of the line (which means they opposed something happening )or whether they were on the right side (which means they all wanted it to happen) – it didn’t matter. Once you controlled for the opinions of affluent Americans, interest groups, and lobby organizations – average people, their voice was not heard at all.

Or at the very least, their opinion didn’t appear to matter at all.

Average folks only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it. And all this data comes from a time when these groups were arguably less powerful in American politics. America never sold itself as a democracy; it sold itself as a representative democracy.

There’s accountability from voters onto politicians. But politicians, they get time in office. Step away from the passions of the electorate for at least a little while. Do things that are right for the country, and then voters will judge them on whether or not they did a good job.

So maybe it’s the case that affluent Americans and interest groups and politicians, they’re always right. And average voters, you can just safely ignore them. But it doesn’t look like America’s been run so well. We had a massive financial crisis that threw tens of millions of people out of work because we didn’t regulate Wall Street. We got into a disastrous war in Iraq. We have median wages that hasn’t substantially grown in many, many years.

It doesn’t seem that we are so incredibly good at running this country. Maybe we need a little bit more democracy in our representation.