Democracy:
“Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.” Oxford English dictionary
“The United States, under its Constitution, is a federal, representative, democratic republic, an indivisible union of 50 sovereign States. With the exception of town meetings, a form of pure democracy, we have at the local, state, and national levels a government which is: ‘‘federal’’ because power is shared among these three levels; ‘‘democratic’’ because the people govern themselves and have the means to control the government; and ‘‘republic’’ because the people choose elected delegates by free and secret ballot.” Document issued by Congress in 2003.
The men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution were intelligent, well educated, prosperous white men, one of the greatest assemblages of such people in history.
All men, most of not all property owners, many owned slaves. They never envisioned women or slaves voting. They feared the rise of autocrats and “mob rule”.
Voting was left to the states. From the beginning there was disagreement over the power of federal government, Hamilton on one side, Jefferson on the other. There’s a recent book on the subject. Our first president, George Washington, put both of them on his cabinet. The two of them formed the first two political parties, which much changed eventually became the Republican and Democratic parties of today.
True democracy requires the participation of all citizens, or at least a super majority. “Eligible voters” expanded to former male slaves and other minorities with the 14th and 15th Amendments. The Women’s Suffrage Movement began in the mid-1800s, and finally resulted in white women having the guaranteed right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920, just 100 years ago last year. Minorities didn’t have that guarantee until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the 1960s, reaction to civil rights, desegregation and the Voting Rights Act gave birth to the religious right political movement. Women’s and LGBT rights became targets.
Please see my article on voter suppression.
The countries with the healthiest economies and happiest people are democracies, social democracies, where more people are involved and vote, they have strong unions, far better healthcare and education than many in the U.S.
In practice, we live in a plutocracy, government by and for the very wealthy and wealthy special interest groups. In theory, any group of people can form special interest groups and fund themselves. Unions were such groups, but due to lack of participation and active suppression of unions, they’ve lost influence.
Unions gave us 40 hour weeks, overtime pay, the end of child labor, holidays, fair pay, paid time off, better education, were a factor in employer healthcare…
Every other developed country and many less developed countries have some form of universal healthcare, at generally less than half our per capita cost. That cost, $7,000 to over $20,000 per year per employee, is a major cause of jobs moving to other countries.It’s also a factor in the drive to automation, further loss of jobs.
Wealth and income inequality is at it’s highest in modern history. Those who became wealthy or inherited wealth seek to protect and increase their wealth, at the expense of everyone else. Some of those are the people who funded the religious right and other right wing organizations.
Tobacco companies were early funders, now it’s very wealthy people who inherited their initial wealth, and fossil fuel interests, with $billions from members of those organizations.
Ironically, oil producing and defense industry states like Texas are healthy economically in part due to high wages, thanks to strong unions. When union employees got raises and improvements in benefits, so did all employees. I saw it working for Texaco.
I’ll have another post on economic systems, but those social democracies I mentioned are capitalist, but it’s constrained capitalism, with controls on executive compensation and required minimum wages.
The U.S. has unconstrained capitalism, with interlocking boards of directors, who approve each other’s compensation packages. The “Citizens United” rulings made the situation much worse. Like voter suppression and the destruction of women’s and LGBT rights, allowed by Paul Weyrich and Federalist Society judges appointed by Reagan, GW,and Trump. Weyrich was one of the most influential unelected men in modern history. More on that later.
This is from the Wharton School, Trump’s alma mater. It’s about perceptions not reality. In reality the U.S. ranks far below all the other top ten in healthcare and education, most of them social democracies.
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