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The USA never was a Democracy(on the occasion of Biden's "Summit for Democracy")Piero Scaruffi, January 2022 The US constitution is a vastly overrated document that was written in 1787 by some 50 aristocrats, half of which were slaveholders, and none of which cared for the right of women to vote. The US constitution was never meant to be democratic. None of the founders believed in democracy. Alexander Hamilton stated: "The body of people do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny that they are frequently led into the grossest errors by misinformation and passion, would be a flattery which their own good sense must despise." (Speech to the New York ratifying convention, 1788) John Adams: democracy "never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide" (Letter to John Taylor, 17 December 1814) James Madison: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob" The framers of the US constitution were strongly anti-democratic people, jealous of their (aristocratic) rights, with no intention to surrender power to the masses. It wasn't Athens that inspired the founders of the USA. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had a different model of government in mind: the Iroquois Confederacy. Thomas Jefferson spent a year with the Iroquois in upstate New York. The constitution was inspired by Iroquois practices, like checks and balances. The US constitution conveniently left out aspects of the Iroquoi society that would have altered the balance of power in the USA. For example, among the Iroquoi only women could vote even though only men could serve; and of course there was no slavery. Whatever the origins, the USA was born as a federal, constitutional republic. States are the ultimate arbiters of power, and the federal government has limited powers. Neither the states nor the federal governments are meant to be fully democratic, except for the House (parliament). Originally, the senate was not elected by the people. Now it is, but each state is represented by two senators, which makes it the most undemocratic institution of all: a citizen of Wyoming (population 600,000) is represented by two senators just like California (population 39 million), i.e. the vote of a citizen of Wyoming counts 70 times more than the vote of a citizen of California. Worse: article V of the constitution makes it impossible to change this because it permanently forbids amendments allowing proportional representation in the senate. The constitution does not grant any representation in the house or senate for those who live in Washington DC: the District of Columbia is a federal district, not a state, and therefore has no representation in the house or the senate. So the 578,000 citizens of Wyoming get two senators in the Senate while the 692,000 citizens of Washington DC get zero. Ditto for Puerto Rico, which is a colony (an "unincorporated territory"), not a state. The Supreme Court has (intentionally) little to do with the will of the people, but, unfortunately, it also has little to do with the merits of the judges who get there: judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate and they remain in power until they either resign or die. The composition of the Supreme Court depends on whoever is president and whoever controls the senate when one judge dies or resigns. It is a lottery, not a meritocracy. Today, conservative (Republican-appointed) judges enjoy a staggering 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court despite the fact that the Republican Party has won the presidential popular vote only once in the last 34 years. Trump was president only for four years, having lost the election to Hillary Clinton by three million votes, but was lucky to preside over the death of three judges of the Supreme Court (i.e. 33% of the Supreme Court). Obama was president for eight years, having won the majority of the popular vote both times, and appointed only two. Like all lotteries, its outcome can be irrational and unfair. The key aspect of the US constitution was and is the separation of powers, but that separation is achieved again through an undemocratic trick: the Congress (elected by the people) is checked by the president (who is appointed by the electoral college based on which presidential electors the states appoint, which is generally not proportional to the votes) and by the judiciary (whose federal and supreme judges are appointed, not elected, and for life). Basically, the USA is a mixture of monarchy (the president), aristocracy (senators, who were originally appointed by state legislatures, plus federal/supreme judges, nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate), and democracy (the House representatives, i.e. the parliament). Defenders of the undemocratic aspects of the constitution point out that those undemocratic aspects defend the rights of minorities. It turns out that the "minority rights" that the founders most cared for were property rights because they (the founders) came from the wealthy families of the colonies and wanted to make sure that the majority would never confiscate their properties. In fact, there was nothing in the constitution to protect the rights of minorities like blacks and Chinese, not to mention women who are not even a minority. For the same reason they loved the right to bear guns: i doubt they deluded themselves that, in the event of a war against an invading enemy, militias made up of ordinary people would be more effective than the army, but they certainly wanted to have guns to defend themselves from mobs, a more likely scenario. The framers of the constitution were far less interested in democracy than in protecting their own rights. The constitution didn't grant any right to slaves, nor to women. Slaves won freedom (if not voting rights) some 70 years later after a civil war that could have gone either way. Women won the right to vote 140 years later in 1920: the 19th amendment, which means that 18 amendments were considered more urgent/important than giving women the right to vote. Was the undemocratic constitution meant to defend the rural states from the urban states? Maybe so, but the dichotomy rural/urban has long become obsolete. Why not divide the states between post-industrial (i.e. high-tech) and old industrial? Does the constitution defend the rights of Florida (home to old-fashioned corporations, none in the top 80 of the Fortune 500) from Washington state, the state of Seattle (i.e. Microsoft, Amazon)? Or why not divide the states between sea states and landlocked states? Why in heaven the only dichotomy that matters is between rural and urban? In any event the constitution that was meant to defend the rights of the rural states is the main reason that the USA is sliding into "minority rule", de facto a dictatorship of the sparsely populated rural states (a tiny minority of today's population) over the majority (the densely populated states). Apparently, the US constitution was designed to defend the rights of the minority but not the rights of the majority. The constitution is not helping the peace between rural and urban states: it is fostering a new civil war as that minority has learned to exploit the undemocratic aspects of the constitution to seize and remain in power while the majority, justifiably, feels under-represented, disenfranchised and cheated. The USA was the "leader" of the democratic world when the rest of the world was less democratic than the USA's pseudo-democracy. Now there are many countries, notably in Europe, that are more democratic. Whether full democracy is a good idea or not is a different discussion, but US presidents like Biden should stop pretending that the USA is the leader of the democratic world. In fact, this hybrid two-party system that is in danger of becoming a one-party system (see The US Slide towards One-party Rule) tends to legitimize other pseudo-democratic regimes like Putin's Russia and Erdogan's Turkey.
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