Proof That The US of A Is Not A Democracy (?)
Is the United States a Democracy? Or is it, rather, a Republic? Are we, as a country, headed toward Anarchy… and inevitably Oligarchy?
There are several schools of thought on this subject. What is your take on the matter?
Proof That The US of A Is Not A Democracy (?) – http://bit.ly/azXVRH
Oh, I was just wondering about this myself. I’m still a bit confused, actually…
Is there a name for our government?
Before Abraham Lincoln, Americans most often described their polity as a “union,” a “federation,” or a “confederation.” And when it was described as a “republic” or a “nation,” it was usually understood to mean a federation or union. For example, in a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Constitution, John Quincy Adams describes America as a “confederated nation,” held together by “kindly sympathies” and “common interests.” And he went on to say that, should these social bonds fail, “far better will it be for the people of the disunited states to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”
A Lincoln scholar, however, recently acknowledged that “Lincoln was intimately attached to almost no one, and this was how he believed community relationships–local, state, and national–should best function. . . . Lincoln’s imagined America was a nation of strangers.” This is a perfect picture of a modern unitary state, with an all-powerful central authority guaranteeing rootless and egoistic individuals their “civil rights.”
It is this unitary state, “one and indivisible,” that Lincoln and the Republican Party mean when they spoke of “the Republic.”
But such a regime is no more a republic than is the “republic” of the French Revolution or the Peoples’ Republic of China.
So is the United States a ‘republic’? Not by design, no.
Has it BECOME a ‘republic’? Thanks to Lincoln and generation after generation of Lincoln acolytes…
Yes.
Beginning with the Constitution’s adoption, America has been a Republic. But the dominant trend over the last two centuries has been to make it into a democracy as well, a representative democracy, also know as a democratic republic. True, the creation of the Constitution itself was partly a reaction against democracy. In states like Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, the situation was getting way too democratic for the monied aristocracy that had, since the American Revolution, refused to share power with ordinary men.
The causes of the American Revolution were many, but for the monied class there were three principal aims. They sought self-government: that is, they sought to rule the colonies themselves, to further their own interests. They sought to protect the institution of slavery, which had been endangered by Lord Mansfield’s ruling against it in the Sommersett case of 1772. And land speculators like George Washington sought to seize more Native American Indian land, which the British had outlawed.
But to win the American Revolution this predatory elite needed help. Their own rhetoric about freedom and equality led to widespread demands for the right to vote: universal suffrage. In other words, the people began demanding democracy. Even the slaves (white and black alike) demanded to be freed and allowed to vote.
After the British were defeated a centralized, national government was seen by George Washington and company not as a method of extending freedom and the right to vote, but as a way of keeping control in the hands of rich. They wrote several anti-democratic provisions into the U.S. Constitution. Slavery was institutionalized. The Senate was not to be elected directly by the people; rather Senators were to be appointed by state legislatures. The President was not to be directly elected by the voters, but elected through an electoral college. The Supreme Court was to be appointed. Only the House of Representatives was elected directly.
More important to our democracy-versus-republic debate, the U.S. Constitution left the question of who could vote in elections to each individual state. In most states only white men who owned a certain amount of property could vote. So, on the whole, the first federal government that met in 1789 was a republic with only a fig-leaf of democratic representation. This is what today’s commentators mean when they say America is a republic, not a democracy.
Fortunately (for the democrats), the early federal government was not very powerful. In state after state it became easier for white males to qualify to vote. And slowly, decade after decade, our republic became a democratic republic.
At the national level the major steps toward democracy can be marked by amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights guaranteed limits to the power of the federal government. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment effectively extended the vote to all adult male citizens, including ex-slaves, by penalizing states that did not allow for universal male suffrage. The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly gave the right to vote to former slaves. After the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not extend suffrage to women, a vigorous campaign for the vote was launched by women, who received the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
But the main Amendment that tipped the scales from the national government of the United States being a mere republic to being a true representative democracy was the often-overlooked Seventeenth Amendment, which took effect in 1913. Since 1913 the U.S. Senate has been elected directly by the voters, rather than being appointed by the state legislatures. That makes the national government democratic in form, as well as being a republic.
Ok, Artemis. If you are familiar at all with languages and history, then you probably know that there were several different forms of ‘love’ in ancient Greek. In the English language, however, we have… well… love.
It makes conveying one’s emotions a bit complicated, eh?
In the United States we have many, many complications in communication, understanding and even in definition of facts. This has occurred for numerous reasons.
1. No ‘native’ language, culture, community nor history to draw upon. Even from the earliest days of Europeans coming to this land, English was not the only language spoken. The Spanish and Portuguese were here first, remember?
2. Influx of peoples from every country and nationality… which means that many different peoples must co-exist yet somehow maintain their own sense of cultural propriety.
3. Ok. This one is convoluted… literally.
The 10th Amendment limits the powers of the federal government to only those specifically granted to it by the constitution.
Ok. That makes things cut and dried, right?
One would think. Check this out:
The 18th Amendment was the Prohibition of Alcohol.
Then…
The 21st Amendment repeals the Eighteenth Amendment.
Did you know that there was no Federal Income Tax allowed until 1870? (Over taxation by the British was a sore subject with the early Americans. Yet 100 years clears a lot of history and memory.)
Or that the general population could not vote for their own senators until 1913?
So the Constitution of our country is only as solid as the wills of the people in power at any given time to convince one another that they need to be changed.
What I am getting at is that as our country grew exponentially larger and more diverse, our government developed into something of an ‘artificial intelligence’… with a mind and drive of its own… and with no one person left amidst the population who truly understands it. No one.
So what are we?
Ask twenty different people who claim to be ‘experts’… and you are going to get twenty different answers and explanations as to why their answer is the correct one.
At the moment there is no direct answer. The only thing we truly are… is in limbo.
It the beginning, the US was something that is still somewhat unheard of in civics… essentially a ‘cluster’ of states, a union as above. 13 individual entities that scrapped select few roles and substituted federated control for those roles to keep all the states on an even playing field. Consider that before we screwed it up (har-har) the definition of ‘state’ was essentially the same as that of nation.
There is direct evidence that the USA was not intended to be a democracy. Not only is it as much inferred by constitutional language, but if we were to be a democracy, then why the electoral college, and why two houses of congress with one being (originally) filled with selections made by state governments?
We were intended to be a representative republic. And btw, the 17′th am’t was a huge mistake… screwed up the formula. 17′th did away with pretty much the only representation a state government had in the federal government, and since then the federal government has been running roughshod over the state government because the only thing that stops them, the only link between them is the People, and the federal representatives of the People tend to more often than not be real pathological A-holes.
Are we headed for oligarchy? One could say that as the People have rolled over and fallen asleep, we’re already a puppet ‘layered’ oligarchy where some groups have control of some sections of the government and other groups have other parts. Anarchy? LOL. We live under tighter Federal and local legal constraint than at any other time on our history, and likely at greater micro-managed control than most other nations. Throw a yard sale, and end up penniless and on the street because you had an 80′s walkman or some old electronic game and someone bought it for their kid, and CPAC found out (OMG! It has LEAD IN IT and you sold it to KIDS!)… Spray an anthill in your backyard with bug spray, and you’re a felon because “ants” wasn’t on the label of the first can you picked up (“any use of this product not consistent with it’s labelling is a federal felony punishable under….”)… Be cleaning a carbine conversion, and you happen to put the stock back on before you put back on the required 16″ or longer barrel, and by letter of the law you’re up for 10 years and $250,000.
US CFR costs $1,665 to get complete and is 223 issues, each with 200-500 pages. So basically US legal code and regulations comes out to well over 80,000 pages. And that’s just federal; each state has it’s own code annotated as well, I have the 25′th edition compiled state firearms laws and regulations that ATF used to distribute… it’s 460 pages of triple-column fine print. An inch and a half thick pulp bound monster *just* of the laws pertaining to guns. Anarchy? Hardly. Right now I bet you 95% of the population is breaking some state or federal code or regulation to a degree that warrants a fine… and only 0.1% is aware of it. Something as banal as making a decorative knot in the pullstring of your window blinds could be a ‘punishable code infraction’. Ever throw away junk mail you recieved that was addressed to someone else? Holy shit Batman, you’re a federal felon. No voting and no guns for you!
“Or that the general population could not vote for their own senators until 1913?”
They weren’t supposed to, that wasn’t the purpose of the senate. The people put the representatives in the house, the states put the senators in the senate. The people are represented, and the state government interests are represented.
Why do you think we hear so much about ‘unfunded mandates’? It’s because the congress keeps sending down things the states are expected to foot the bill for, the states have *zero* representation in the legislative branch, and the people, bless ‘em, couldn’t give a rat’s ass.
Parting thought;
The federal government was not created to deal with the people, it was created to deal with the states. This is why the constitution is a long list of limits on the power of federal government and contains an implicit provision stating that any power not included within is SPECIFICALLY to be left to the states.
That we have to deal with the federal government in a real way on any meaningful level is an aberration started in a few small ways by Cleveland/Wilson, and pounded home by FDR and the New Deal, particularly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Which was a monstrous decision IMHO… man grows extra wheat to feed own chickens. Man has no intent to sell said wheat in face of price controls set by government. Man popped for fine anyways and told to destroy extra, even though it’s ‘personal’ wheat. US court holds up decision based on the idea somehow that the wheat the man grew for his own use reduced the amount of wheat he would have bought from the ag market, hence making it INTERSTATE COMMERCE to grow his own wheat for his own use.
The government and life in the US hasn’t been the same since.
Oh, wow!
I love all the comments! Very good information, and it helps to clear SOME things up…
Thank you, TM, for that bit of knowledge, and I do agree. We’re only as strong as the weakest link, even in our own government.