Recently Progressives have managed to combine so many narrowly focused and diverse self-interested groups that they are on the cusp of achieving a working majority. What’s new is that government’s role in social policy and transfers has grown so large that a great many people who formerly took little interest in public affairs are now voting, and for narrowly focused self-interested reasons.
Social policies that economically incentivize illegitimacy and divorce, so that children at the lower end of the economic scale are raised without their fathers help and influence are producing diminished lives by the millions and threatening the future of democratic government. A democracy will not likely be successful if a majority of its voting citizens come from dysfunctional families.
The threat inherent in universal suffrage is that of politicians learning to game the system by using the taxing power for transfer payments and subsidies. As transfers and subsidies proliferate, dependency totals grow, and more and more different groups are formed with specific self-interested political agendas, increasing the incentive to see who can promise the most. As politics becomes more scientific and the numbers parsed for each group on the take, the process becomes more and more threatening to the survival of liberal democracy.
In the past, a critical mass of voters put the nations’ welfare first in their political decisions. The majority of the less responsible citizens voted in smaller percentages. They had less incentive to vote for selfish interests because there were few programs that gave financial subsidies to large numbers of people, and public employee unions were few with little political power.