Democracy gone berserk
Now that the country is on the path of impeachment, we hear a lot from politicians and scholars about the genius of the founding fathers and the beauty of the 1788 Constitution. This is part of a cult in the United States, a form of worship. We hear these founders were prescient for anticipating someone like Trump and should be awed by their brilliant creation, which allows for removing a president who abuses his powers.
This archaic instrument, however, carries the seeds of our current predicament. Electing presidents through the electoral college, instead of the more democratic process of direct election by the people, made it possible for Trump to be elected. Five presidential candidates thus far have won the election despite losing a majority of the popular vote, including John Quincy Adams in 1824, in the first U.S. presidential election where the popular vote was recorded, as well as Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016.(1) The others were Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. That’s five too many, and none distinguished himself.
The founders, moreover, created a Senate that is hardly democratic. Under Article I, section 3 of the Constitution, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.” Therefore, ordinary voters originally played no role in electing senators. While this changed with the adoption of the 17th Amendment in 1913, 125 years after the adoption of the Constitution, senators still represent states, not people. Therefore, Wyoming, with a population of just over half a million, carries as much weight in the Senate as California, with a population of almost 40 million, and more conservative rural areas exert outsize influence.
In the first election of 1788-1789, only white men age 21 and older who owned land could vote. Neither women nor blacks had the right to vote under the Constitution until 1870, after adoption of the 15th Amendment, and until 1919 after adoption of the 19th Amendment, respectively. Only following the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal barriers broken at the state and local levels concerning the voting rights of blacks. The landowning requirement was eliminated between 1792 and 1856, but the wealth requirement only totally disappeared with the abolition of the poll tax in 1964. Despite these legal advances, there still isn’t full equality for women and people of color. And wealth continues to produce an outrageous imbalance of power favoring the radical right.(2)
Various historical forces propelled pre- and post-constitutional practices and provisions, and the debates leading to their adoption contain intelligent arguments pro and con, or at least reflect the spirit of the times. The U.S. constitution is still one of the greatest documents in history, and the founders were without exception highly intelligent, brave, and patriotic Americans. Many were outstanding thinkers, lawyers, philosophers and writers. Jefferson and Franklin were multilingual, as much at home in Washington as in London or Paris, and demonstrated exquisitely refined social graces. They were great men in their public roles, but some had serious flaws and could not rise to greatness in all respects. Jefferson knew that slavery was loathsome(3), for example, but he was a racist who had over a hundred slaves at his service. Before dying, Jefferson cruelly refused to liberate his slave concubine, Sally Jennings, and other members of her enslaved family–despite her entreaties.(4)
Thus, the foundational legal instruments and zeitgeist embodied conditions of inequality and injustice that contributed eventually to the Civil War, Jim Crow, and a nation rife with social injustice, not the beacon of democracy described in sanitized school lessons. Thankfully, the constitution’s more revolutionary elements, such as the Bill of Rights, provide some support to the popular myth of exceptionalism.
It wasn’t by chance that the Founders were all white men and nearly all were wealthy slave owners. Nor is it a coincidence that until the present most of the political power and influence lies in the hands of white, wealthy men who have benefited from the riches created by black labor. The median minimum net worth of senators and House members as of February 2018 was $511,000—quintuple the median net worth of an American household, estimated at $97,300 in 2016.(5) The actual disparity is probably much greater because of the way members of Congress are allowed to hide their net worth.
The fact is Madison’s was convinced that direct democracies—such as the assembly in Athens–unleashed populist urges that overcame the cool, deliberative reason espoused by Enlightenment thinkers like himself, Hamilton and John Jay, who wrote The Federalist Papers, the essays supporting ratification of the Constitution. “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he argued in Federalist 55. The founders often referred to common people as a “mob” and feared their influence in politics. Ironically, these fears are being fulfilled not because of too much participation, but too little.
Thus, we have a president facing impeachment who has damaged every pillar of our nation; disparaged the judiciary and Congress; obstructed the Mueller and impeachment investigations; demoralized the FBI, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies; humiliated himself and the country before Putin and Kim Jong Un; promoted xenophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy; abused immigrant families and kidnapped many of their children; associated himself with criminals, some of whom are or may soon be in jail; committed crimes for which he would have been indicted were it not for a Department of Justice memo that a federal judge has held not to be authoritative; sought and received the assistance of a foreign adversary to cheat in his 2016 election; tried to shake down another foreign government to help him cheat once more in the 2020 election; made every effort to remove protections for the environment and life on earth; supported a murderous regime in Saudi Arabia and hitched himself to authoritarians and dictators throughout the world; continuously undermined alliances with other democracies; engaged in conspiracies to cover up his misdeeds; lied constantly about everything under the sun; offended war heroes, although he was a draft dodger; acted boorishly, indecently, and unethically in many ways unbecoming of the presidency or private life; blamed everyone but himself for anything that went wrong and took credit where he didn’t deserve it; and every day comes up with something more offensive than what he did the day before, until it seems impossible, but somehow he manages to go lower.
Yet, the House issued two mere articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. That. Is. It. All of the above misdeeds, plus the rampant corruption, and the whole $30 million Mueller investigation? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Why? We suffer a political party that excuses the bribery, treason, and “high crimes and misdemeanors” (which in this context just mean “misbehavior”) committed by the president, and promotes an alternative reality where neither facts nor logic matter. With Trump in the role of Hitler wannabe, the “only one who can fix our problems,”(6) Republican leaders like Jim Jordan and Lindsey Graham play Goebbels and keep repeating bigger and more brazen lies, even in the face of testimony by military and diplomatic officers who have had distinguished careers or were appointed by Trump himself, or both, which contradicts their narrative. They have declared war on truth and debased themselves in the service of their caudillo. The Democrats are reduced to feeble and meaningless actions, guided not by their sworn duties, but by fear of losing elections. The founders feared the mischief that political parties could cause(7), but could hardly have imagined the pernicious misuse of social media or such pusillanimous and unpatriotic politicians.
In the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservative ideologues, sit two justices, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, who were credibly accused of sexual assault and were still confirmed by the Senate, probably because in both cases additional witnesses were not allowed to corroborate their principal accusers. Kavanaugh gleefully demonstrated also that he’s a partisan hack and lacks the temperament and judiciousness necessary to sit on the high court. His main qualification seemed to be screaming that he was a member of the elite single-mindedly pursuing the goal of becoming a justice.
This same court has promulgated the absurdity that corporations are people with many of the rights of natural persons.(8) But, of course, corporations cannot be put in jail, and therefore engage in misconduct and criminality without consequences–other than fines that are calculated to be the price of doing business. This allows for the legalized corruption of the political process by the billionaires and multinationals.
It has also held absurdly that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to keep and bear arms irrespective of membership in the militia, thus erasing qualifying language in the Amendment, although the same justices that so held typically argue for strict adherence to such language. This will make it almost impossible to stop the madness of mass shootings that occur daily in this country, even if the stranglehold of the National Rifle Association could be broken.
To top it all off, it has held that money equals free speech, further unleashing the power of dark money in the political arena through “stealth politics” practiced by America’s billionaire class.(9)
Next year, the high court will hear important cases dealing with Trump’s claims that he’s above the law. This will test the myth of impartiality. They have already decided that gerrymandering is legal, almost guaranteeing that a majority will never rule.(10) In the House, gerrymandering allows candidates to select their voters instead of voters selecting their candidates.
Consequently, in the past three elections before 2018, Democrats won ~4% fewer seats than corresponded to their votes. The Brennan Center estimated they would need to win the House popular vote by ~7% to win the barest possible majority.(11) In fact, in 2018 Democrats rode a blue wave and won the popular vote by 7%, resulting in a gain of 41 seats, but they would have won more but for gerrymandering that favors Republicans.(12) Many senators and representatives are in Congress only because of gerrymandering.(13)
The evil is not just Republican perfidy. A 2016 Harvard Business Review study concluded the edifice is broken because “Democrats and Republicans control the political system through mutually beneficial rule-making done behind the scenes . . . The parties have enacted rules that protect their dominance by controlling the primary process, access to voter data, fundraising limits, how Congress is governed, and what issues are debated. The system even coopts media attention and access, which creates a major barrier to entry [to other players].” The result is a government that doesn’t benefit most ordinary voters, but “the constituencies that [the system] was built to serve best: primary voters, donors, and lobbyists for special interests, including businesses.”(14) Politics, therefore, is largely “disconnected from serving the people and producing positive results.”
In 2015, two professors from Princeton and Northwestern University “took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys [over a period of 20 years] and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.” This finding confirms what we always knew: it is economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists who get their way.(15)
We are therefore justified in also asking, what kind of democracy is this madness? How can anyone call this “the greatest democracy in the world”?
Let’s stop this cult of the Constitution, which the founders did not offer as an everlasting solution for the conflicts and issues we face. The constitution already has 27 amendments. We need to repeal one and add a few more to ensure that we (1) stop the massacres of innocents in their schools and places of worship; (2) prevent future Trumps; and (3) achieve greater equality, wealth distribution, and social justice. Or else should we hold another constitutional convention to bring the whole document into the 21st Century and continue advancing toward “a more perfect union,” to cite the preamble of the Constitution. Unfortunately, it is legitimate to fear that, under the present balance of power, that could make matters even worse.
Amaury Cruz is a writer and political activist from Miami Beach. He has a Juris Doctor from the FSU College of Law and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from SUNY-Binghamton.
1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote.
2 See Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer.
3 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/founding-fathers-and-slaveholders-72262393/.
4 https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/jefferson-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-a-brief-account/.
5 https://www.rollcall.com/news/hawkings/congress-richer-ever-mostly-top.
6 https://www.cnbc.com/video/2016/06/22/trump-im-the-only-one-who-can-fix-our-problems.html.
7 https://www.history.com/news/founding-fathers-political-parties-opinion.
8 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/.
9 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/30/billionaire-stealth-politics-america-100-richest-what-they-want.
10 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/upshot/the-gerrymandering-ruling-and-the-risk-of-a-monopoly-on-power.html.
11 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/17144198/gerrymandering-brennan-center-report-midterms-democrats-house-2018.
12 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/07/opinion/midterm-elections-2018-republican-gerrymandering.html.
13 https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/05/08/how-republicans-gerrymandered-the-senate/.
14 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/lack-of-competition-accountability-are-crippling-americas-ability-to-thrive-report-says/.
15 https://www.upworthy.com/20-years-of-data-reveals-that-congress-doesnt-care-what-you-think.
