It’s a fact that the Founding Fathers didn’t design a democracy. They gave us a governmental framework that established a constitutional republic.
For more than two centuries, however, voting rights—which in the original Constitution were limited to white male landowners—were steadily expanded, and most Americans believed that our elections were fair and honest. These perceptions led many Americans to assume that they lived under a democratic system.
Over the same period, the United States benefitted from our constitutional system based on three equal branches of government. We have had constitutional crises, to be sure, but for most of our history the branches accepted the spirit of the separation of powers and governed accordingly. This also enabled our system to change and evolve organically over time.
The Founding Fathers, for all their wisdom, anticipated the inevitability of governmental corruption. They settled on the separation of powers concept, in fact, precisely because they felt that such an arrangement made disasters (in the form of a true democracy or total corruption) impossible. The Founding Fathers did not plan, therefore, for an era in which all three branches of government would become completely corrupted, simultaneously, by a tiny cabal of the ultra-rich. The Supreme Court, whose members the Founding Fathers saw as dependably apolitical, would see to that.
But it wasn’t impossible. And it’s our misfortune—and great challenge—that it is our era in which this corruption has become total and made our system completely unworkable for ninety-nine percent of its citizens. Today we have a completely rigged system that takes maximum advantage of the long-standing constitutional restrictions on democracy and completely perverts—or, more commonly blatantly ignores—the rest of that foundational document to serve the interests of the ultra-rich. Most politicians are not admitting to this reality, but the vast majority of Americans understand it explicitly, and they have, not surprisingly, already lost faith in our government.
What we have now is a national death by strangulation by a tyranny of the minority that becomes more entrenched and more invincible with each passing day. (I hate it that the fascists have co-opted the term “tyranny” and that I run the risk of sounding like a member of an armed militia by using it, but it’s the right term for what is going on.)
Here in the United States corporations have been legally defined as people so that they can benefit from the laws protecting the rights of people to participate in politics. There is no limit on corporate contributions to political campaigns and those donations can be made anonymously. The votes of our lawmakers are not only owned by these corporations, but they spend the vast majority of their time raising even more money. Our laws indemnify corporations and the ultra-rich from being held accountable for their actions and their products. Our laws stifle competition by maintaining existing monopolies like the fossil fuel industry and crippling other options and strategies, ensuring that climate change will eventually cause nothing less than the end of the human race. Legislators have slashed corporate taxes and allowed the ultra-rich to move jobs—and their vast cash holdings—overseas and to pollute the environment with impunity, with no penalties for doing so.
Here in America the rich have engineered, in just the last few decades, a truly cosmic shift in wealth distribution—totally in their direction. They have won their war against labor unions, which built the thriving middle class in America by giving workers a say in wage bargaining. Union membership has been decimated by “right-to-work” laws and campaign finance restrictions. The unions are effectively dead, wages have been totally stagnant, and the much-vaunted American middle class has perished along with them.
Here in America when one party achieves a majority in a state legislature, it is free to redistrict that state to achieve permanent political majorities in Congress and in that legislature. These safe seats have killed bipartisan lawmaking at the state and national levels. The only people who have the power to kill these phony districts are the people who designed them in the first place.
Here in America ANY legislation has to be approved by the House, a super majority in the Senate, and the President, and upheld, if necessary, by the Supreme Court. The three hundred thousand residents of Wyoming have as much representation in the Senate as the thirty-eight million Americans who live in California. The six hundred and thirty thousand people who live in Washington, D.C. have no voting representatives at all. Congress has stopped passing any significant legislation—the huge exception being, of course, a massive tax cut for the rich—because of the impassable roadblock that is the Senate and because they don’t want to be held accountable by the voters or their corporate sponsors.
Here in America we have a criminal, ultra-rich President who has publicly declared war on the rule of law enshrined in the Constitution, refused to allow Congress to oversee the executive branch, and openly dared Congress to stop him from completely ignoring them and by ruling by tweet and fiat. He has allowed a foreign government to interefere in our national elections and hs made it clear that he will not stop it from doing so again. And he has filled his Cabinet with fellow white rich men who are utterly corrupt.
Here in America we have a Supreme Court whose most recent members were selected for their partisan views and approved along party lines. One of those justices owes his seat to blatant partisan thievery. It is these justices who have defined corporations as people and upheld partisan redistricting on behalf of the minority party. And that minority party has appointed 123 federal judges in the past eighteen months, ensuring that if by some miracle Congress does pass meaningful progressive legislation, the judicial branch will certainly kill it.
The corrupting influence of money has corrupted all three branches of our government and exposed our system’s lack of enforcement mechanisms for such a situation. Our system requires a makeover--a task that seems impossible given that all three branches of government are utterly corrupt. Removing Trump is critical since it may be our last chance as a country to throw any kind of roadblock in front of the tiny gang of rich criminals who own this country. But if you think Trump created this phony excuse for a government, or if you think that removing Trump will reverse it, then we’re done for. We in the currently powerless majority need to roll up our sleeves and fight like demons to take back our government--precinct by precinct, county by county, and state by state. We can’t pass a constitutional amendment, but we don’t need to do that to make the Senate more democratic by adding more states by breaking up California and giving D.C. statehood, and we can at a minimum add one more seat to the Supreme Court to replace the one that was stolen. The Democrats took back the House with their landslide last year, but given that a criminal gang that holds all the cards and all the money, it’s clear that working within the system will not be enough. All we have is our numbers, and that’s not nothing. But we will need to be brave enough and committed enough to show up in the streets to demonstrate that we are the majority and to put as much pressure as possible on the entrenched minority. At this point we have allowed things to devolve so precipitously that many of us won’t likely live long enough to see a real change of power, but a struggle beats the hell out of sentencing our children to lives spent as pawns of the rich.
I’m reading Gordon S. Wood’s “Friends Divided,” an account of the friendship and rivalry between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The Founding Fathers did not build a perfect system, but they created the greatest and most liberal political experiment of their age. These were privileged men who turned away from their comfortable lives, their successful careers, their guaranteed privilege, and many of their countrymen to risk arrest and execution in order to launch an experiment that was the envy of underdogs the world over. We may no longer have that will or spirit in our national DNA. We’ll find out.