Authored by Gabriel Rockhill via Counterpunch.org,
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.
~~~
My tags: UNITED STATES, Democracy, Plutocratic Oligarch Republic, Draconian Laws, Colonization, Founding Fathers, Hierarchy, Aristocracy, Class Warfare, Propaganda, Economic-Elite Domination, Sub-classes, Covert War, Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, White Supremacists, Capitalism, Spin-Doctors, Collective Power of the People,
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