Democracy, as it has been attempted in America, never quite made it out of the shell.
And that may not be such a bad thing.
A friend--I guess I can call him a friend--a Saudi Prince I knew in Washington, DC, once remarked with his best Omar Sharif smile, "You Americans: you think everyone wants democracy, but many people do not. Many countries do not."
Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first World War as a war which was meant to make the world safe for Democracy, among other things. He was half right: It had become a war between two democracies (of sorts), England and France, then America and autocratic monocracies--Germany, Austria/Hungary. But Russia, a czarist monocracy, fought allied to the democracies, and the "democracies" of those years were far from governments of the people. That war was the death throes of monarchies, but it did not extinguish the idea of leadership of nations by strongmen, by autocrats.
Woodrow Wilson, that great champion of Democracy, purged the American government (civil service) of Blacks, and that wasn't the worst of it for Black Americans, who had virtually no say in American government since America abandoned reconstruction in the late 19th century. And Wilson rejected the idea of women voting. So American representative democracy was representative only for white males, and not even for all of them. Mostly for the middle and upper class whites, as it was in England.
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| Home of the Free, Land of the Brave |
America, in fact, was no friend to democracy if that meant government of the people, by the people and for the people if those people happened to be Filipinos in the new American empire, or Cubans or Central Americans or people in Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
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| American soldiers on bones of Filipinos |
When Black veterans returned home from the horrors of the Second World War they found themselves excluded from the GI bill which allowed their white comrades in arms to buy homes and to start acquiring the wealth home ownership would build. The democratic government of the United States conspired to keep them down.
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| The will of the people, American style |
When Scandinavians snort at the cold heartedness of Americans who will not even extend healthcare to their own countrymen, we can ask the Swedes if they would be willing to pay for helathcare for the Portuguese, the Spanish or the Italian members of the European union. They look a bit horrified at that idea. So how "democratic" are the instincts of these liberal, socialist democracies?
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| Adulation Popular Will |
When I talk with the folks who stream in and out of my offices in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, I hear from people, every day, who think the government is illegitimate because it steals their money, by taxation, and give it to people who don't deserve it, like immigrants in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and while the HVAC guy pays top dollar for his medications he knows, or thinks he knows, about welfare scammers who get all their medications for free, while they sit home and watch TV, cookout on the grill while blasting their annoying Spanish music on the deck.
In my own town, a majority of voters believe that separation of church and state is ridiculous, and they agree with the current Supreme Court and Marjorie Taylor Greene that separation of church and state is unconstitutional.
The current Supreme Court, voted in with Trump, believes individual gun ownership is a right guaranteed by the Constitution because, after a hundred years of stare decisis decisions saying you had to be in a well organized militia to own a gun legally, all that went poof when gun enthusiast Antonin Scalia said guns were an inalienable right. And the idea that the rule of law involved trying to be consistent over time, being confined to legal precedent, we have entered a time when everything is now "unprecedented."
Then again, Thomas Jefferson thought it was a bad idea to be bound by precedent. He thought the Constitution should be rewritten every 19 years to accommodate new challenges, new thinking and new realities. That was his idea of Democracy.
The voters of New Hampshire believe in open carry laws for guns, which can be carried into voting places openly, by the law of the governed, even as they close off their schools with bullet proof glass at the entrances.
The guy at the hardware store thinks immigration is an infestation and he wants the government to keep it's government hands off his Medicare and Social Security.
These are the voters who have seized control of their democracy.
The big difference between American government and that of the Third Reich--which most people in Hampton could not actually identify if you asked them--is the violence.
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| Southern voters Expressing Themselves |
You had guys walking around the Capitol grounds in sweatshirts that said, "The Civil War Starts Now" but they did not actually fire guns at the police. They merely bludgeoned police.
We will have actual fascism, as I understand the meaning of that word, when we have violence in the streets, and government shooting citizens--but wait we had Kent State and we've had the Pettis Bridge and Selma, and a lot of voters voted to endorse that violence.
So, I don't know. Maybe we've already made that transition.
When you look at the rule of "the people" maybe we've never really had it and now that we have "the people"--or at least 46% of them in a united mob seizing control of the democracy, maybe democracy doesn't look all that good any more.
