Extractive American Politics: Considering Democratic Costs

In this era of climate change, reliance on extraction as a source of value creation has come increasingly into question. Concerns about externalities are central points of contestation. Similarly, political economists have long traced how extractive industries tend toward corruption, undercutting democracy along the way. However, systems that deplete natural resources are not the only extractive force shaping American democracy. Rather I argue that extraction also exists as a political ethos that prioritizes the accumulation of private profit over the needs of communities. I theorize a system of extraction that relies on the siphoning of collective resources into private coffers through policy regimes. Crucially, this process need not be explicitly tied to material practices of extracting. Creating lucrative tax rewards for firms or the transferal of public utility management to private-sector actors, for example, removes social resources that might otherwise be collectively managed, harming democratic institutions in the process.