Kenneth Michael Panfilio—18
becoming an increasingly troublesome obstacle to participation in the political process by real
people.
At stake for citizens is the opportunity for grappling with serious global issues, in
exchange for the faux choice of becoming a consumer citizen faced instead with the
overwhelming choice of which brand of toothpaste to buy in the politically vacuous McWorld.
Ben Barber explains that “McWorld’s culture represents a kind of soft imperialism in which
those who are colonized are said to “choose” their commercial indenture. But real choice
demands real diversity and civic freedom. It also requires willingness by the United States to
work multilaterally and internationally to build global democratic infrastructures that rise next to
McWorld and offset it’s trivial and bottom-up but all-too-pervasive hegemonies.”
39
No longer
are people equal players in the political process, but people with the economic wealth behind a
powerful company. The formal presence of such economic roles relegates people to a second-
class citizenship and makes the type of civic engagement necessary for the maintenance of an
open society a social priority subservient to the interests of corporate gain.
40
Yet, the totality of
this problem does not simply reside in the actions of powerful transnational corporations but in
our unmet responsibility as citizens to demand a different ordering of social relations.
Thus, in an ironic twist, it is possible to see the central location of the strong economy,
weak democracy dialectic at play in the United States. It is our larger our economic prowess and
its continued advancement through projects of global capital building that has put the very life
blood of our own democratic space at risk. Nowhere in significant number are people in the
United States taking ownership for their culpability in this problem, in spite of the tacit benefits
39
Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, (New York:
Ballantine Books, 2001), xxi.
40
William Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
Convention