The U.S. is Not a Democracy. It Never Was.
One of the most steadfast beliefs regarding the United States is that
it is a democracy. Whenever this conviction waivers slightly, it is
almost always to point out detrimental exceptions to core American
values or foundational principles. For instance, aspiring critics
frequently bemoan a “loss of democracy” due to the election of clownish
autocrats, draconian measures on the part of the state, the revelation
of extraordinary malfeasance or corruption, deadly foreign
interventions, or other such activities that are considered
undemocratic exceptions.
The same is true for those whose critical framework consists in always
juxtaposing the actions of the U.S. government to its founding
principles, highlighting the contradiction between the two and clearly
placing hope in its potential resolution.
The problem, however, is that there is no contradiction or supposed
loss of democracy because the United States simply never was one. This
is a difficult reality for many people to confront, and they are likely
more inclined to immediately dismiss such a claim as preposterous rather
than take the time to scrutinize the material historical record in
order to see for themselves. Such a dismissive reaction is due in large
part to what is perhaps the most successful public relations campaign in
modern history. What will be seen, however, if this record is soberly
and methodically inspected, is that a country founded on elite, colonial
rule based on the power of wealth—a plutocratic colonial oligarchy, in
short—has succeeded not only in buying the label of “democracy” to
market itself to the masses, but in having its citizenry, and many
others, so socially and psychologically invested in its nationalist
origin myth that they refuse to hear lucid and well-documented arguments
to the contrary.
To begin to peel the scales from our eyes, let us outline in the
restricted space of this article, five patent reasons why the United
States has never been a democracy (a more sustained and developed
argument is available in my book,
Counter-History of the Present).
To begin with, British colonial expansion into the Americas did not
occur in the name of the freedom and equality of the general population,
or the conferral of power to the people. Those who settled on the
shores of the “new world,” with few exceptions, did not respect the fact
that it was a very old world indeed, and that a vast indigenous
population had been living there for centuries. As soon as Columbus set
foot, Europeans began robbing, enslaving and killing the native
inhabitants. The trans-Atlantic slave trade commenced almost immediately
thereafter, adding a countless number of Africans to the ongoing
genocidal assault against the indigenous population. Moreover, it is
estimated that over half of the colonists who came to North America from
Europe during the colonial period were poor indentured servants, and
women were generally trapped in roles of domestic servitude. Rather than
the land of the free and equal, then, European colonial expansion to
the Americas imposed a land of the colonizer and the colonized, the
master and the slave, the rich and the poor, the free and the un-free.
The former constituted, moreover, an infinitesimally small minority of
the population, whereas the overwhelming majority, meaning “the people,”
was subjected to death, slavery, servitude, and unremitting
socio-economic oppression.
Second, when the elite colonial ruling class decided to sever ties
from their homeland and establish an independent state for themselves,
they did not found it as a democracy. On the contrary, they were
fervently and explicitly opposed to democracy, like the vast majority of
European Enlightenment thinkers. They understood it to be a dangerous
and chaotic form of uneducated mob rule. For the so-called “founding
fathers,” the masses were not only incapable of ruling, but they were
considered a threat to the hierarchical social structures purportedly
necessary for good governance. In the words of John Adams, to take but
one telling example, if the majority were given real power, they would
redistribute wealth and dissolve the “subordination” so necessary for
politics. When the eminent members of the landowning class met in 1787
to draw up a constitution, they regularly insisted in their debates on
the need to establish a republic that kept at bay vile democracy, which
was judged worse than “the filth of the common sewers” by the
pro-Federalist editor William Cobbett. The new constitution provided for
popular elections only in the House of Representatives, but in most
states the right to vote was based on being a property owner, and women,
the indigenous and slaves—meaning the overwhelming majority of the
population—were simply excluded from the franchise. Senators were
elected by state legislators, the President by electors chosen by the
state legislators, and the Supreme Court was appointed by the President.
It is in this context that Patrick Henry flatly proclaimed the most
lucid of judgments: “it is not a democracy.” George Mason further
clarified the situation by describing the newly independent country as
“a despotic aristocracy.”
When the American republic slowly came to be relabeled as a
“democracy,” there were no significant institutional modifications to
justify the change in name. In other words, and this is the third point,
the use of the term “democracy” to refer to an oligarchic republic
simply meant that a different word was being used to describe the same
basic phenomenon. This began around the time of “Indian killer” Andrew
Jackson’s presidential campaign in the 1830s. Presenting himself as a
‘democrat,’ he put forth an image of himself as an average man of the
people who was going to put a halt to the long reign of patricians from
Virginia and Massachusetts. Slowly but surely, the term “democracy” came
to be used as a public relations term to re-brand a plutocratic
oligarchy as an electoral regime that serves the interest of the people
or
demos. Meanwhile, the American holocaust continued unabated,
along with chattel slavery, colonial expansion and top-down class
warfare.
In spite of certain minor changes over time, the U.S. republic has
doggedly preserved its oligarchic structure, and this is readily
apparent in the two major selling points of its contemporary
“democratic” publicity campaign. The Establishment and its propagandists
regularly insist that a structural aristocracy is a “democracy” because
the latter is defined by the guarantee of certain fundamental rights
(legal definition) and the holding of regular elections (procedural
definition). This is, of course, a purely formal, abstract and largely
negative understanding of democracy, which says nothing whatsoever about
people having real, sustained power over the governing of their lives.
However, even this hollow definition dissimulates the extent to which,
to begin with, the supposed
equality before the law in the United States presupposes an
inequality before the law
by excluding major sectors of the population: those judged not to have
the right to rights, and those considered to have lost their right to
rights (Native Americans, African-Americans and women for most of the
country’s history, and still today in certain aspects, as well as
immigrants, “criminals,” minors, the “clinically insane,” political
dissidents, and so forth). Regarding elections, they are run in the
United States as long, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns in
which the candidates and issues are pre-selected by the corporate and
party elite. The general population, the majority of whom do not have
the right to vote or decide not to exercise it, are given the
“choice”—overseen by an undemocratic electoral college and embedded in a
non-proportional representation scheme—regarding which member of the
aristocratic elite they would like to have rule over and oppress them
for the next four years. “Multivariate analysis indicates,” according to
an important recent study
by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “that economic elites and
organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens
and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite
Domination […], but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral
Democracy.”
To take but a final example of the myriad ways in which the U.S. is
not, and has never been, a democracy, it is worth highlighting its
consistent assault on movements of people power. Since WWII, it has
endeavored to overthrow some 50 foreign governments, most of which were
democratically elected. It has also, according the meticulous
calculations by William Blum in
America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy,
grossly interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries, attempted
to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders, dropped bombs on more than
30 countries, and attempted to suppress populist movements in 20
countries. The record on the home front is just as brutal. To take but
one significant parallel example, there is ample evidence that the FBI
has been invested in a covert war against democracy. Beginning at least
in the 1960s, and likely continuing up to the present, the Bureau
“extended its earlier clandestine operations against the Communist
party, committing its resources to undermining the Puerto Rico
independence movement, the Socialist Workers party, the civil rights
movement, Black nationalist movements, the Ku Klux Klan, segments of the
peace movement, the student movement, and the ‘New Left’ in general” (
Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom, p. 22-23). Consider, for instance,
Judi Bari’s summary of its assault on the Socialist Workers Party: “From 1943-63, the federal civil rights case
Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General documents
decades of illegal FBI break-ins and 10 million pages of surveillance
records. The FBI paid an estimated 1,600 informants $1,680,592 and used
20,000 days of wiretaps to undermine legitimate political organizing.”
In the case of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement
(AIM)—which were both important attempts to mobilize people power to
dismantle the structural oppression of white supremacy and top-down
class warfare—the FBI not only infiltrated them and launched hideous
smear and destabilization campaigns against them, but they assassinated
27 Black Panthers and 69 members of AIM (and subjected countless others
to the slow death of incarceration). If it be abroad or on the home
front, the American secret police has been extremely proactive in
beating down the movements of people rising up, thereby protecting and
preserving the main pillars of white supremacist, capitalist
aristocracy.
Rather than blindly believing in a golden age of democracy in order
to remain at all costs within the gilded cage of an ideology produced
specifically for us by the well-paid spin-doctors of a plutocratic
oligarchy, we should unlock the gates of history and meticulously
scrutinize the founding and evolution of the American imperial republic.
This will not only allow us to take leave of its jingoist and
self-congratulatory origin myths, but it will also provide us with the
opportunity to resuscitate and reactivate so much of what they have
sought to obliterate. In particular, there is a radical America just
below the surface of these nationalist narratives, an America in which
the population autonomously organizes itself in indigenous and
ecological activism, black radical resistance, anti-capitalist
mobilization, anti-patriarchal struggles, and so forth. It is this
America that the corporate republic has sought to eradicate, while
simultaneously investing in an expansive public relations campaign to
cover over its crimes with the fig leaf of “democracy” (which has
sometimes required integrating a few token individuals, who appear to be
from below, into the elite ruling class in order to perpetuate the
all-powerful myth of meritocracy). If we are astute and perspicacious
enough to recognize that the U.S. is undemocratic today, let us not be
so indolent or ill-informed that we let ourselves be lulled to sleep by
lullabies praising its halcyon past. Indeed, if the United States is not
a democracy today, it is in large part due to the fact that it never
was one. Far from being a pessimistic conclusion, however, it is
precisely by cracking open the hard shell of ideological encasement that
we can tap into the radical forces that have been suppressed by it.
These forces—not those that have been deployed to destroy them—should be
the ultimate source of our pride in the power of the people.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/13/the-u-s-is-not-a-democracy-it-never-was/
