After then-President Donald Trump’s White Supremacist fanboys swarmed the national capitol, overthrew some furniture, scared Ted Cruz into a closet, and returned home to couch surf, pundits and Blue Wavers could not cease from breathlessly asking if they were witnessing the “End of Democracy in America!” This imagines an autocratic Banana Republic, evoking the phony Red Scare that they project onto socialist states such as Cuba, Venezuela, and China. Contrary to this popular belief, in terms of government accountability, direct participation, and population restrictions, the United States cannot legitimately be called a democracy.
If democracy is a government for the people, according to the most recognizable definition, politicians should be held accountable to their constituents and all those they affect. However, in the United States, this is arguably not true.
For instance, instead of politicians being accountable to the people they supposedly represent, they are vetted, paid for, and bought by corporations and monied interests. Money dictates who is chosen and what the chosen representatives do. Roughly 90% of elections in the US are won by the candidate who spends the most money on campaigns, and since most of the political campaigns run in the millions, the poor are left out of influencing the outcomes right out of the gate. These campaigns are financed by corporate interests such as Big Oil, Big Banks, Weapons Manufacturers, Big Pharma, and to an extent Big Union. One merely needs to follow the money to know who is in charge and which way the winds blow in Washington DC, state capitals, and city halls. Tracing the gold brick road answers why the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen in 12 years, devaluing 21% even before the latest inflation; why the country has spent $80 billion arming Ukraine for an unwinnable war; why the supposed “workers party” will fight against universal healthcare to its dying breath; why instead of halving the Armed Forces’ carbon emissions — larger than many countries — both parties double down on expanding the military and dooming the planet.
Functionally, these money allocations are legal bribes, but corporate-government dalliances go much deeper: into insider trading, exorbitant speaker fees and book deals[1], and appointments at corporate board rooms and think tanks after political office. In fact, over half of sitting Congress members are millionaires (Evers-Hillstrom). Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her husband are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it in stocks and bonds potentially affected by insider knowledge Pelosi is privy to in her office. When asked if politicians should be involved in trading stocks, Mdm. Speaker answered, “We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” oddly referring to the collective of her peers and herself in the third person.
Concerning accountability, ineffective and corrupt politicians are rarely recalled or held to account. On the occasion they are, workers are disrespectfully subjected to a clown show run strictly down party lines. Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump went through impeachment processes (and now a post-tenure trial) noticeably bereft of consequences but certainly full of bluster. In no case, however, has a US politician been brought before an international tribunal despite their initiation of and covering up of war crimes done in sovereign nations. Former national security legal advisor to George W Bush, John Bellinger, argues that the US does not comply with the International Criminal Court because “the prosecutor for the court would be given too much power unchecked, and… conduct politically-motivated prosecutions of U.S. soldiers.” Bellinger ignores the reality that military personnel and national leaders would have to do unspeakable acts in another country to be brought up in front of The Hague. The hypocrisy is abysmal. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence and genocide in the world, but its main victims can neither vote nor hold US politicians to account for the damage committed to their families and homes.
While the classic definition also holds that democracy is “by the people,” Americans rarely determine what most affects them. For instance, the presidency is not decided by popular vote but by the Electoral College, a relic from slavery. Half of the last four presidents, George W Bush[2] and Donald Trump[3], lost the popular vote. Policies and referendums are seldom voted on by the populace but by the politicians. The few popular referendums are usually non-binding or sometimes overridden, as when Florida’s Governor DeSantis sidelined voting restorations for formerly-incarcerated people.
Fundamentally, the highest law of the land, the Constitution, also was not approved by the citizens but by supermajorities of the ruling elite. While the Constitution was written under slavery and to spread Indigenous genocide, it has never been rewritten to reflect a different vision of America. Currently, the polarity spectacle of the two parties makes even adding amendments virtually impossible. The interpreters of that highest law, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) justices, are selected by the president and endorsed by the Senate. They are then free to rule for life, only answering to their opinions. The 99% have no say in who lands there, how long they rule, or how they rule. In fact, when news broke this summer that the Court was to overturn abortion, Congress leaped into action to protect the justices from being criticized or protested against at their homes, despite their actions impacting citizens in their personal lives and bodies. Contrast this to Cuba where citizens fully participated in both creating and voting for a new constitution (Ginsburg) and local officeholders are recommended and recognized by the community.
Although a genuinely democratic government would be of the people, selected groups such as women and Black people have historically been denied participation in the governing process. Women fought for and received the right to vote over 100 years after the country’s founding, but this only applied to white women. Black people would bloodily struggle for another half-century. Landmark SCOTUS cases, the “Marshall Trilogy,” infantilized native nations to mere “wards” of the federal state with limited political rights. While Indigenous nations continue to fight for their land and political will, the default setting is secondary to the federal government’s will, with SCOTUS acknowledging and then taking back hard-fought rights.
The common understanding of the 3/5ths Compromise is that a Black person was only considered three-fifths a person, but neither side saw it as such. Under slavery, only three-fifths of a Black person was countable politically, but zero-fifths could vote. Instead, the enslaved’s political capital was stolen by the slavers and those who benefited from the slave institution in some way — slave catchers and drivers, accountants and banks, and poor white people who only benefited compared to their Black peers. Voting rights won after the Civil War were withdrawn by the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and an increasingly conservative Republican Party, giving birth to Jim Crow. Even after the blood-won Civil Rights gains a century later, with racial gerrymandering and Supreme Court-supported voter repression, Black people in the Deep South still hold little political power (Corriher).
Immigrants and prisoners also face electoral segregation. The US tends to define citizens not as those who live, work, and are involved in their communities, but as those either born in the country or who go through a grueling process to prove their “worthiness” and fealty to the state — often through monetary means — to receive documentation. Thus, the undocumented, or as-yet-unapproved, are denied access to the polls. Even still, they are often accused of ‘stealing the vote’ as Trump falsely claimed in 2016.
Further still, felony convictions and incarceration bar millions more from the right to vote. The racial disparity is significant enough to draw connections to slavery. In addition to the two million locked up on any given day, prior felony convictions prohibit another five million from voting. In three Southern states, over 8% of the adult population is barred from voting due to felony convictions, while in seven states one out of every seven Black people is. Across the country, 6.2% of Black people can’t vote while 1.7% of non-Black people cannot — Indigenous and Latinx people are similarly disproportionately disenfranchised. Redistributing the political power of racialized peoples to those who maintain prisons is reminiscent of the 3/5s compromise.
Granted, there are remnants of the democratic process in the United States. People can and do choose individual candidates and parties via secret ballots. What few processes there are should be protected; however, the fact that the same establishments that are supposed to protect these rights are the very ones endangering them indicates that the system is inherently anti-democratic.
Considering the lack of direct involvement in the political process via accountability, the popular vote, and voter access, it is clear that the United States is not a true democracy. Malcolm X once said that the choices for political power are between the ballot and the bullet. Americans should question why the US is the world’s largest purveyor of violence both abroad and in its own disenfranchised communities. Is it partially due to the fact that Americans are denied political power in their own homes?
Bibliography
Corriher, Billy. “Fighting Gerrymandering in the South’s Black Belt.” Facing South, 16 Dec. 2021, https://www.facingsouth.org/2021/12/fighting-gerrymandering-souths-black-belt.
Evers-Hillstrom, Karl. “Majority of Lawmakers in 116th Congress Are Millionaires.” Open Secrets, 23 Apr. 2020, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires//.
Ginsburg, Mark. “Constituting Socialism for the Twenty-First Century: Examining Cuba’s 2019 Constitution.” International Journal of Cuban Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, Winter 2021, pp. 303–30. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.2.0303.
Hall, Madison. “See Every Stock Trade House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Husband, Paul Pelosi, Has Made Since 2021.” Business Insider, 17 Oct. 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-stock-trades-congress-investments-2022-7.
Kimberley, Margaret. “The January 6th Scam.” Hood Communist, 30 June 2022, https://hoodcommunist.org/2022/06/30/january-6th-scam/.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence.” Originally delivered 4 Apr. 1967, Retrieved from American Rhetoric, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
Koerth, Maggie. “How Money Affects Elections.” Five Thirty-Eight, 10 Sept. 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/.
Macagnone, Michael. “Congress Leaps to Action After Supreme Court Protests.” Roll Call, 12 May 2022, https://rollcall.com/2022/05/12/congress-leaps-to-action-after-supreme-court-protests/.
“Marshall Trilogy.” UAF Dept of Tribal Governance, https://uaf.edu/tribal/academics/112/unit-1/marshalltrilogy.php.
Martin, Michael. “The U.S. Does Not Recognize the Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.” All Things Considered, 16 Apr. 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/04/16/1093212495/the-u-s-does-not-recognize-the-jurisdiction-of-the-international-criminal-court.
McCaskill, Nolan. “Trump Says Illegal Immigrants Pouring Across the Border to Vote.” Politico, 7 Oct. 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/trump-immigrants-pouring-over-border-to-vote-229274.
Uggen, Chris, Ryan Larson, Sarah Shannon, and Arleth Pulido-Nava. “Locked Out 2020: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction.” The Sentencing Project, 30 Oct 2020, https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/locked-out-2020-estimates-of-people-denied-voting-rights-due-to-a-felony-conviction/
“Voting Rights Restoration Efforts in Florida.” Brennan Center for Justice, 31 May 2019, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-restoration-efforts-florida.
Wilson, Scott. “In Demand: Washington’s Highest (and Lowest) Speaking Fees.” ABC News, 14 July 2014, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/washingtons-highest-lowest-speaking-fees/story?id=24551590
Yglesias, Matthew. “Obama’s $400,000 Wall Street Speaking Fee Will Undermine Everything He Believes in.” Vox, 25 Apr. 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/25/15419740/obama-speaking-fee.
Yoon, Robert. “$153 million in Bill and Hillary Clinton Speaking Fees, Documented.” CNN, 6 Feb. 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-speeches
Zipperer, Ben. “The Minimum Wage Has Lost 21% of Its Value Since Congress Last Raised the Wage.” Economic Policy Institute, 22 July 2021, https://www.epi.org/blog/the-minimum-wage-has-lost-21-of-its-value-since-congress-last-raised-the-wage/.
Footnotes
[1] Yoon reports that Bill and Hillary Clinton took in $153 million in speaking fees between them both before Hillary ran for president in 2015; Obama is accepting $400,000 in speaking engagements from a healthcare conference funded by a bond firm according to Matt Yglesias; Scott Wilson reports that Donald Trump was pulling $1.5 million dollar speeches, and big business-aligned Treasury Secretary and Fed Reserve Chairman Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke were paid 200,000–400,000 to speak for banks, and G W Bush has taken in regular speeches worth 150,000 each as has his co-conspirators Condi Rice and Dick Cheney.
[2] Who was also helped by his brother, Jeb, then governor of Florida, and the Supreme Court.
[3] By half a million and two million votes, respectively.
