The United States is
Not a Democracy
June 27, 2026
I’ve been told my whole life that my country, the United
States of America, is a democracy. We’ve claimed to be democracy’s defender all
over the world. It’s obvious, of course, that we have been no such thing; but
we’ve still claimed to be that abroad, and we have always claimed to be truly democratic
at home. The undeniable truth, however, is that the United States of America is
not a democracy and never has been. The list of reasons why it is not and never
has been is long. Here are the reasons I’ve thought of so far.
In addressing this issue, we have first to consider what a
democracy is. The word comes from Greek roots that mean “rule by the people.” A
true democracy is a political system in which the people who are the subjects
of the system actually rule themselves. Ideally, they do so quite directly. The
old New England town meeting was democratic. There, the people of a town met
together and together made decisions about their life together. The United
States has never been ruled that way.
Nonetheless, most Americans think that the United States
Constitution creates a democracy. It doesn’t. Instead, it creates a
“representative republic.” The people do not vote on laws, at least at the
federal level they don’t.[1]
Instead, they elect people to national offices who, in theory, represent them
and their interests. At the national level, these representatives are the
president, the vice president, the members of the Senate, and the members of
the House of Representatives. These are the people who enact and, in theory at
least, enforce the nation’s laws. The United States is a republic because it is
not a dictatorship (though Trump would like it to be with him as dictator), and
the people elect the people who make the laws. Those characteristics, however,
do not make the country a democracy. They just make it a republic.
Next, I would say that the country is too big to be a true
democracy. The United States is geographically enormous. It stretches from
Alaska and Hawaii to Maine and Florida. Although India and China have orders of
magnitude more people than the US does, we are still the third most populous
country in the world. We are also an extremely diverse country. We sometimes
seem to be so diverse that it doesn’t make much sense for us to be one country
at all. I live on the “left coast,” in the Pacific Northwest of the country.
And I live west of a mountainous divide that even seems to make my state really
two states.
I find the politics of much of the rest of the nation to be
not just wrong but to be reprehensible. Yet we are all one country, and I and
people who think like I do have to live with the consequences of millions of
other Americans thinking very differently and very destructively. Sometimes it
seems that my state of Washington has so little in common with, say,
Mississippi that it truly doesn’t make any sense for us to be all part of the
same nation. Washington and Mississippi nearly always vote for candidates of
different parties with different priorities and agendas. Why are we in the same
nation? Why do Mississippians have a say in laws that affect Washingtonians? I
can explain it through history. I can’t make it make political sense.
There is another more or less geographical problem that
makes the United States not a democracy. It is the way senators are apportioned.
Our states are immensely diverse in size. California has a population
approaching 40 million. The population of Wyoming is only slightly over 500,000.
Yet all states have the same number of senators. That means that the vote of a
Wyoming voter for a senator carries far more weight than does the vote of a
California voter for a senator. That result is, of course, radically
undemocratic.
The same is true of the way we elect the president and vice
president. They are not elected solely on the basis of popular vote. Rather,
they are chosen by the “electoral college.” Each state has the number of
electors in the electoral college that corresponds to their total number of
federal representatives and senators. Perhaps with very rare exceptions, the
electors vote for the candidates who won the popular vote in their state. Because
every state has two senators regardless of its population, this arrangement
gives small population states far more say per capita in the election of the
president and vice president than do large population states. This arrangement
not infrequently results in a candidate who did not receive the majority of the
national popular vote winning the election, an undemocratic result if ever
there were one.
Then there is the question of what the Republican Party is
trying to do to our elections these days. President Trump and his acolytes are
engaged in a concerted campaign to deprive as many voters of the vote as they
can. They strive in particular to reduce the number of women and people of
color who actually cast votes. They want the federal government not the states
to control state elections, never mind what the US Constitution says about the
matter. They keep insisting that there is a massive problem with voter fraud
when there isn’t; and when they lose an election, they claim the vote was
rigged when it wasn’t. The Republican Party is no longer a small d democratic
party. It is no longer committed to democracy, and, at the moment, it controls
our federal government. Republican politicians seem to care about only two
things—passing laws that benefit the very wealthy at the expense of the people
and holding onto power so the federal government can’t pass laws they don’t
like. True democracy advocates neither of those things, so the Republican Party
has become truly un-democratic.
Then there is the matter that is primary factor in
determining that the United States is not a democracy. It is the power of money
in our politics and a Supreme Court ruling that gives the ultra-wealthy the
ability to infuse limitless amounts of money in political campaigns. In a case
called Citizens United, decided in 2010, the US Supreme Court held that
donating money to political campaigns is free speech protected by the First
Amendment and that, therefore, the government cannot restrict corporations or
labor unions from contributing as much money to political campaigns as they
want. Big corporations and the wealthy people who control the benefit from
them, of course, have far more money than labor unions do. Therefore, since Citizens
United, even more than before that decision, money is deciding the outcome
of our elections. The result is that Republican politicians, who actually
represent only a minority of American voters, buy their way into office and run
the country for their own benefit not the benefit of either the middle class or
of people truly in need.[2]
So no, the United States of America is not a democracy. Two
possible changes in the law would go a long way toward curing that fault in our
body politic. We could, and should, amend the Constitution to eliminate the
electoral college and provide for the election of the president and vice
president by a popular majority of the votes case nationwide. We would then
never again have a president who received less than a majority of the popular
vote as we have had far too often. There would still be disproportionate
representation in the Senate. I don’t expect that we can ever eliminate the
electoral college because the small population states that benefit from it
would never vote to ratify an amendment that eliminated it. It is even less
likely that we will ever deal with the disproportionate representation of the
people in the Senate. We are, I fear, stuck with this undemocratic character of
governmental structure.
We must, somehow, do the other thing that would bring us
closer to being a democracy, namely, get money out of our politics. Because Citizens
United is grounded in an interpretation of the US Constitution, it would
take a constitutional amendment to overturn it unless, that is, the Supreme
Court overturned it itself.[3]
The current Supreme Court, with its majority of ultra-conservative justices,
who certainly appear to be in the pockets of the wealthy, white population and
were appointed by Republican presidents, will never do that. So we’re stuck
with the unlikely prospect of amending the constitution to overturn Citizens
United. That, I fear, will never happen because the monied classes will
never let it happen. They don’t want the country to be democratic. They want it
to be an authoritarian oligarchy with Republicans in control.
Those of us who value true democracy cannot give up the
fight. The stakes are too high. The politicians money puts in power have been
ruling against the people and for the wealthy far, far too often (and once is
too often). Our country needs a peaceful, nonviolent democratic socialist
revolution, not that I truly expect one to happen except perhaps in some of the
progressive “blue” states. Unless it does happen, we’ll remain stuck with an
undemocratic country far too often controlled by the wealthy. Would that it
were otherwise, but it isn’t.
[1]
Some states have initiative and referendum systems in which the people do
occasionally vote directly on some laws or proposed laws. These systems are
nowhere near pervasive enough to turn even one state into a true democracy much
less the entire country.
[2]
Money wouldn’t have the power in our elections that it does if more American
voters were not persuaded by television advertising and did not buy the lies of
the MAGA Republicans, but I sure don’t expect that to happen.
[3] I
hear of Democratic politicians say they will overturn Citizens United
through legislation. They can’t. The Constitution always trumps mere
legislation, and Supreme Court says the Constitution, not a mere federal
statute, requires its decision in that case.
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