Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

American Democracy Has Been Killed

The Supreme Court put the final nail in the coffin this summer. Now we have to raise democracy from the dead.

Demonstrators protest outside the White House, on March 12, 1965.

I can afford no sentimentality about America. For hundreds of years, a majority of my fellow Americans preferred to see me in bondage, tilling the fields, mercilessly beaten, and regarded as much less than human. For a hundred years more, a majority preferred me as their indentured servant, but not as their political equal. And until only recently, a majority preferred to see me jailed, sickly, and alone for the crime of loving another man. Yet the view from down here, where my rights are negotiated out of my sight, and where my perceived wrongs are met with state-sanctioned brutality, lends itself to remarkable clarity about the health of our democracy.

Here is the truth: The grand experiment in democratic self-government that a band of revolutionary soon-to-be Americans launched 250 years ago has been taken out back, shot, and left for dead. This moment is the culmination of intentional efforts to trade democracy for plutocracy precisely when democracy might permanently place the levers of power in the hands of those of us down here—those of us who, because of our distance from the white straight male paradigm, have always been restrained from capturing the power of democracy. The culprits of our demise drape themselves in American flags and symbols while performing Judas’s function at the last supper of our democracy. History is not surprised; its sense of humor is irony, after all.

What’s more, our unwillingness to see this democratic downfall as such doubles our danger. It would be risky enough to live under an undemocratic regime and know it, but it is nearly fatal to live under one while behaving as though a single future election, timely death, or minor repair is all that is needed to restore some former glory.

Many Americans want, indeed, need this not to be true. They need to tell their children that American democracy is strong. And by that they mean not only effective but safe from people like me. They need to be able to say that we have not failed to preserve for ourselves and our progeny that which was entrusted to us by previous generations.

But my children cannot afford for me to tell them this lie. I cannot leave them unprepared for the reconstruction effort that lies ahead if I wish for them to pass to their children anything that looks, feels, or sounds like a democracy.

Perhaps we can ease our grip on the fiction if we start with easily digestible bites. We should at least be able to agree that an essential characteristic of a democracy is that the people choose their leader. Yet twice already in this century more Americans have voted for the opponent of the man placing his hand on the Bible. When the keys of government are handed over to the non-winner in other countries, especially countries run by people who look like me, the American government rightfully calls it a coup. We should not call it anything less when it occurs here.

It doesn’t matter that the mechanism for the coup is embedded in our founding document—a document that created fractional humanity for Black people and required amending to give political rights to half our species. There is no sound claim that the first elections of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump reflect a healthy democracy. But the men who designed the Electoral College preferred the sound of democracy in each other’s voices more than the practice of it with everyone in these United States.

We have mostly tolerated the antidemocratic nature of the Electoral College because, until fairly recently, its outcomes have more or less matched the choice of a majority of voters. Prior to the 2000 election, the mismatch between the two had not occurred in over 100 years. Now not only has it happened twice in the first quarter of this century but it is even more likely to occur after the 2030 census reallocates House seats.

How many more times must we give the nuclear codes to someone who has not garnered the support of a majority of the electorate before we are willing to accept that, when it comes to the........

© The Nation