Democracy -- or Lack Thereof -- in the USA

What's up Willow?

When republicans whine that the US is a republic not a democracy, they aren't completely wrong. It is both, actually: a republic and a representative democracy. It is more of a republic than any sort of democracy, though. The US Constitution isn't a democratic document. It establishes several powerful institutions of government to thwart the will of the people.

Broken Constitutional Institutions

The Electoral College

The people don't elect the president directly. The electoral college does. Sometimes the vote in the EC does not at all reflect the popular vote. Consider Bush vs. Gore (2000) and Trump vs. Clinton (2016). In both cases, if the will of the people had been reflected, we would have ended up with a Democratic president. Democracy did not give us Trump; oligarchy did. Oligarchy codified as the Constitution by a bunch of slave-owning white dudes from the 18th century.

The Supreme Court

Nine people, appointed for life-time seats? That doesn't sound very democratic to me. There's a huge gulf between the people and the Supreme Court. The people elect electors (sort of), who in turn elect the president, who appoints Supreme Court justices.

The Senate

Rome had one of these. The name comes from "senex", Latin for "old". Senex is also where we get the words senile and senescent. It was intended to be -- and is -- a gerontocratic body of the wealthy, just as it was in Rome. The senate favors small states, because all states have the same number of senators. Wyoming has as much pull in the Senate as does California. Before 1913, the people didn't even elect their senators directly. The state governments did that. Now, we at least elect our senators, but due to the filibuster and the need for supermajority, it doesn't really matter any more. Nothing can get done in the Senate. We might as well have them be appointed by Emperor Palpatine, for all the good they can do.

The House of Representatives

This body was actually intended to reflect the will of the people. It, too, is broken. We should have far more representatives in the House than we actually do. According to Wikipedia, the number of voting members in the House has been fixed at 435 since 1913. Again, according to Wikipedia, the population of the United States was 92,228,531 in 1910. In 1913, each representative in the House represented approximately 212020 constituents. Fast forward to today. Wikipedia tells me that the population of the US was 331,449,281 in 2020. Today, each representative represents approximately 761952 constituents. A Congressperson in 2023 represents 3.6 times more people than a Congressperson of 1913 did. Let's put that another way. Someone living in 1913 is almost 4 times more well-represented than somebody living in 2023. If the size of the House had kept up with population growth, we should have 1566 representatives, rather than the meager 435.

Other Threats to Democracy

Gerrymandering and Attacks on Voting Rights

I don't know as much about this as I'd like, but I do know that gerrymandering is a real problem in the US. Aside from gerrymandering, there are deliberate choices made that prevent people from voting or that make it unduly difficult. For instance, there are fewer places to vote and longer lines at the polls in areas that are heavily Black or Hispanic. Election day isn't a holiday, so needing to work imposes another barrier to voting among the working class. This is why Republicans are so terrified of vote by mail. They can't use location and time pressure to prevent the "wrong people" from voting.

For what it's worth, I have my own story about voting trouble. I'm blind. So is my girlfriend. We were going to vote in the midterms. Thankfully, we live in an enlightened state. There are accessible ballots. They're sent through email as HTML files. You fill them in and print them out. You can even mail them in if you want to. But we decided to drop ours off at the county elections office. My thinking was that I wanted to guarantee that my vote was counted. It didn't work!

Sometime later, we received letters from the county commissioner. "Your ballot envelope wasn't signed, so your vote cannot be counted. You can resubmit a ballot between now and November 29th." I'm the guy who scans and processes mail for the house, because nobody else wants the job. I'm rather lackadaisical about it. The paper mail sits in a pile on my living room table until the pile grows large enough to annoy me into scanning it. Suffice it to say, I opened that letter in February, months too late. Despite going out of our way to drop off our ballots, our votes were not counted. Grant you, part of that is my fault. I live in a fairly enlightened place. How much worse is it for those who don't?

The Media

There is a whole book to be written about how the US mainstream media made Donald Trump. He claims to hate them, because his base eats that up. He's a narcissist, and the media gives him the thing he craves most: attention. The media have not learned their lesson, and they still continue to amplify the MAGA wing. For a contemporaneous example, see the recent 60 Minutes interview with Marjorie Taylor Green. At its very best, the US media is guilty of both-sides-ism. At its worst, it actively enables the rise of fascism. It feels good to point fingers at Faux News and other disreputable outlets, but CBS et al are just as guilty as the rest. They figuratively pour gasoline on the fire every time they give some idiot like Green a platform. Are they really that stupid?

In the US, presidential elections stretch out for many months. This allows corporate media to turn them into a circus every four years. The Barnham and Bailey circus barkers are already starting to bark about 2024 primaries. End this. Maybe months and months of election year was appropriate for the horse and buggy days, but no longer.

Conclusion

The US is broken, and it has been broken since its founding. For a while in the mid 20th century, it was at least trying to get better. See my Plot Against America post for more on that.

The US likes to call itself a democracy sometimes, but it needs a lot of work before it is one in fact. We could start by fixing our institutions. Abolish the filibuster, or at the very least, defang it. Increase the number of representatives in the House, and give the people adequate representation. Abolish the electoral college, or require that it reflect the popular vote. I'm not really sure what to do about the Supreme Court. Ideally, it should not be a political body at all, but it is. While we're talking about political bodies that shouldn't be, we need a widespread investigation into the 501C3 tax status of a good many churches, because I can assure you that preachers of hate are out here using their pulpits to stump for the fash and getting a free ride while doing so.

The Plot Against America