American Democracy Is
Critically Ill
American democracy is critically ill. Our political system
still looks, more or less, like a democracy, but that appearance is a false façade.
It covers up the truth that our political system is at risk of being no longer
at all democratic—if indeed it ever was truly democratic to begin with. Of
course, most Americans don’t know that American democracy is critically ill;
and even if they suspect that it might be, they won’t admit that it could be. Several
undeniable truths show how critically ill American democracy is. We’ll look at
some of those truths here.
Before we get to those truths, however, we must consider
what democracy is supposed to be. Linguistically, it means “government by the
people.” In theory, in a democracy the people that the democracy governs
determine the what their government is and who is to lead it. The people
usually do that through free and fair elections in which every eligible voter
has to opportunity to cast a vote. In a true democracy, all votes are equal. No
one’s vote carries more weight than anyone else’s vote. Most commonly, the
people elect representatives, who are the one who carry out the government’s
work.
The US Constitution was never intended to be perfectly
democratic nor has it ever been perfectly democratic. We see two significant
ways in which it is not democratic in the document itself. It creates a federal
judicial system. That system has immense power over many aspects of American
life, but the people do not elect its judges. A judicial vacancy is filled by
the president nominating someone to fill it and the Senate either approving or
rejecting that nomination. There are solid arguments why this is a better way
of selecting federal judges than having the people voting for them would be,
but what this system is not is democratic.
Yet the undemocratic way our nation fills judicial vacancies
is not the most important undemocratic aspect of our federal government. The undemocratic
aspect of the Constitution that is the most important has two related features.
The first is the way the number of senators is assigned to each state. Our
states differ wildly in how any people live in them. The population of Wyoming,
for example, is around 590,000. The population of California is nearly
40,000,000. Thus, California has an enormous number more people than Wyoming
does. Yet each of those states has the same number of US senators, i.e., two. The
vote of each citizen of Wyoming, then, is substantially more important in
determining the makeup of the Senate than is the vote of each citizen of
California. This system of allocating senators to the states may have made some
sense when it was created in the late eighteenth century when the country was
much more a union of sovereign states than it is today. It makes no sense
whatsoever today; but even if it did make any sense, it would not be democratic
because it weights the votes of some Americans more heavily than the votes of
other Americans.
The undemocratic aspect of the Constitution that is closely
related to the problem with the allocation of senators to the states is the
electoral college. Under the US Constitution, the American people do not
directly elect their president and vice president. Rather than count the
national popular vote, the Congress approves the vote that each state has
submitted to the federal government separately. The weight of the vote of each
state is determined by the number of the members of the House of
Representatives each state has plus two for the state’s senators.
A state’s number of representatives is based on the state’s
population. Thus, Wyoming has one member of the House of Representatives while
California has fifty-two such representatives. The allocation of the number of
members of the House is thus more or less democratic. But the fact that every
state has the same number of senators unbalances the presidential votes of the
states. Just as small population states have disproportionate power over the makeup
of Congress, so the small population states have disproportionate power in the
election of the president and the vice president.
The disproportionate power of the small population states in
the selection of the president and vice president has resulted on five
different occasions in a person being elected president though that person lost
the national popular vote. That has happened twice quite recently. George W.
Bush was elected president though he lost the popular vote in 2000. Donald
Trump was elected president though he lost the popular vote in 2016. A person
who lost the popular vote becoming president is, of course, grossly
undemocratic. Because our constitution allows it, it has actually never been
appropriate to call America a pure democracy.
Then there is the question of money. It costs an immense
amount of money to run any political campaign, with presidential campaigns, of
course, costing the most. It seems that candidates and their staffs spend as
much time and energy asking people for money as they do explaining their policy
positions. Money has always been a corrupting factor in American politics, but
it’s worse now than it has ever been before. In 2010, the United States Supreme
Court issued its decision in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. That
decision held that it is unconstitutional to restrict the amounts of money corporations,
nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other associations may give to
political campaigns. The result was the opening of the floodgates for
unrestricted money to flood American politics through nonprofit organizations
such as political action committees. That’s why so many political ads don’t come
from a political campaign itself. They come from misleadingly named PACs whose
donors are concealed or disguised.
Money corrupts politics. Of that there simply is no doubt. In
large part because of Citizens United, political candidates most
Americans would not support but for massive amounts of misleading political
advertising have won election to Congress and to the presidency. Because of the
influence of money, the United States Congress has often been controlled by a
political party, the Republican Party, whose policies most Americans reject. Those
Republican-led congresses have, among other destructive things they have done,
passed tax cuts for the very rich and the very big corporations that do not
benefit the American people at all and which most Americans would reject if
given the chance to vote on them. Republican presidents, the most recent two of
whom did not receive a majority of the popular vote, have signed that
legislation. They thus have ballooned the national debt and imposed hardship on
the American middle class, that is, on most Americans. Citizens United
called the giving of money to political campaigns free speech. It isn’t. It is
people doing something that involves speech not at all, i.e., donating money.
The result of Citizens United has been to make American politics even
less democratic than they were before.
There is, however, an even more important indicator that
American democracy is critically ill. It is the rise of Donald Trump and his
MAGA movement. Trump and his deluded supporters are, quite simply, fascists. They
do not believe in democracy, and Trump makes no bones about the fact that he
does not. Trump has made it perfectly clear that he would be America’s Vladimir
Putin if he could, and Putin is nothing if not a Russian fascist. Trump
believes that elections are legitimate only if he and his designated candidates
win them. He continues to claim that he won the 2020 presidential election when
he undeniably did not. He tried every legal way he could to overturn the result
of that election. When legal means didn’t work, he sent an angry mob to attack
the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its
constitutional duty of counting and certifying the votes of the states in the
electoral college.
One clear indicator of Trump’s fascism is his willingness to
use violence to achieve his political ends. His attack on the Capitol on
January 6, 2021, is the most egregious example of that willingness, but it is
not the only one. He openly supports anti-democratic movements like the country’s
numerous white supremacy groups. He tells armed thugs who attack peaceful counter
protesters to “stand back and stand by,” an encouragement to prepare for
violence if ever there were one. As I write these words, we have just learned
that Trump has called for his political opponent Liz Cheney to be put in front
of a firing squad. He does not think of his political opponents as opponents.
He thinks of them as enemies. He is quite prepared to treat them as such, which
is another of his fascist tendencies.
There is very little doubt that if Trump wins the 2024
presidential election, American democracy will be more critically ill than it
already is. But, of course, he may not win the 2024 presidential election. What
would it mean for American democracy if he lost? What would it mean if not only
he lost but his designated minions running for Congress lost as well? It would
mean at most that American democracy has received a stay of execution. Vice
President Kamala Harris, as nearly as we can tell, believes in American
democracy. She would not try to set herself up as America’s dictator the way
Trump would. Her winning the 2024 election, however, would not be a miracle
cure for American democracy’s critical illness.
That’s because even if Harris wins, nearly half of all
American voters will have voted for the fascist Donald Trump. However the
congressional races come out, at least nearly half of all American voters will
have voted for Trump lackeys to represent them in our national legislature. Democracy
is fragile. The American constitutional government, as not completely
democratic today as it has ever been, has survived longer than any other
democracy ever has. Yet it is still fragile. It cannot survive if nearly half
of all Americans no longer believe in it. It cannot survive if a significant
number of Americans take up Trump’s call to use violence to overturn legitimate
election results. If that many Americans have lost their faith in their
constitutional government, future elections will be what this one is; not a
contest between legitimate candidates and legitimate though differing views of
what the country needs but a battle for the very survival of America’s good if imperfect
democratic system of government.
If that’s what future American elections become, the
American people as a whole, including those who have not lost it already, will
lose faith in their system of government. They will not continue to participate
in such a bastardized democracy. Extremists on the left will arise to counter
the MAGA extremists on the right. Politicians on the left will begin to assert
that we need a leftist dictator to fend off would-be fascist dictators. If that
happens, American democracy will not be critically ill, it will be dead.
The only way for our country to avoid that tragic fate is
for the American people as a whole to reject Donald Trump and his MAGA
movement. Many of us, of course, already reject them. Indeed, we condemn them,
but tens of millions of Americans don’t. Is there any way to lead those tens of
millions of Americans out of the trap of Trumpist fascism? I wish I had an easy
answer to that question. Perhaps our hope lies in Donald Trump’s inevitable
death. I am not advocating violence here, but Trump is 78 years old and, like
all of us, will die someday. Popular movements that are cults of personality
the way the Trump movement it don’t often survive the death of the cult leader.
After all, they essentially never have a system of succession that puts someone
else legitimately in charge of them. We can hope that Trump’s cult of
personality won’t long outlive him.
But the task we face of ending the MAGA movement is at best formidable.
We can make all of the fact-based arguments we want to counter the deranged claims
of that movement. But facts don’t matter to Trump or to his followers. If facts
mattered, Trump would still be nothing but a sleazy New York real estate
developer, and there would be no MAGA movement. It may be that the only thing
that will end that movement is its coming to power and failing spectacularly to
make life better for most Americans. Perhaps the country will have to hit a
fascist rock bottom before it begins to recover from Trump and his fascism.
I hope that such is not the case, and I may not live long
enough to see whether it is or not, for I’m just as old as Trump is. But German
and Italian fascism ended (to the extent that they have ended) only when
Germany and Italy suffered devastating defeat in World War II. Soviet fascism,
calling itself communism not fascism, ended only when the Soviet economy failed
dramatically because of the way the Soviets tried to keep up with the United
States militarily and because of the internal contradictions of the Soviet
planned economy. It may well be that something similar will have to happen in
this country before we will truly be rid of Trump and his threat to American
democracy.
So. American democracy is indeed critically ill. A healthy
democracy would never produce a Donald Trump or the MAGA movement. A healthy
democracy would never produce a movement like Trump’s that is grounded not in
actual reality but it fear and hatred. We people of faith can pray and work for
a cure for our country. I sure wish I had more hope that we could effect such a
cure.
