American democracy is broken
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
These words from the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill have been quoted so many times that the expression has become the world’s leading political cliché. As the United States, often described as the leading modern democracy, gets set to elect a president and a new Congress this year, the Republican contenders for the top office have treated the American public to the political equivalent of a traveling circus.
Start with Michelle Bachman’s political paranoia, which sees a secret socialist under every other seat in Congress. Follow that with Herbert Cain’s crazy 9-9-9 tax plan and his numerous sexual scandals. Add Ron Paul’s odd mix of wacky pronouncements on race and government and progressive stance on military spending and America’s imperial reach. Throw in John Huntsman’s endorsement of Mitt Romney, shortly after Huntsman left the race after having recently stung Romney with some of the sharpest barbs hurled in all of the numerous debates. Recall the utter ignorance and occasional silliness of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Marvel at Newt Gingrich’s reinvention as a venerable “68 year-old grandfather” from the scoundrel who presented divorce papers to his first wife at the hospital where she was undergoing cancer treatment and the hypocrite who championed family values and persecuted of Bill Clinton and tried to remove him from office for his brief dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky while he was carrying on a six-year extramarital affair with a Congressional staffer. Gape in disbelief as multimillionaire Mitt Romney presents himself as a regular guy and a job creator after making a huge fortune by stripping down companies, firing workers, and selling what remained of the wreckage for a huge profit. Believe Romney when he says he likes firing people – he’s proved it – and ask why it took a disastrous defeat in South Carolina to get the tycoon to agree to release his tax return(s).
The spectacle has been anything but edifying. These are the people that cry that “Washington is broken” and that they want to go in there in order to fix it? They may claim they want to repair Washington – translation, the federal government – but what this bunch really want to do with government is something else altogether. They aim to pulverize it, privatize it, and then monopolize the spoils of a non-government totally lacking the capacity to curb a tiny but powerful pack of profiteers of all stripes. The new robber barons would, for the sake of profit, take this opportunity to rape the environment, reduce workers to nineteenth century conditions, and disregard longstanding laws that protect public health, worker safety, and the purity of our food, water and air. And that’s just the start of what’s in store if any of these candidates – Romney is still the odds-on favorite although lately he has stumbled so badly as to give the new Newt a fighting chance – wins the presidency. Blacks, immigrants, gays, look out!
But there is one thing Republicans are right about. Washington – meaning, in this case, American democracy – is broken. Already, it has become a virtually wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America. And you can remove the word virtually if Republicans achieve their ultimate goal of complete control of all three branches of government.
What ails Washington, what ails American democracy, goes far beyond budget deficits and bloated bureaucracies, as Republicans would have it. There is, of course, the now limitless river of political money that swamps the public interest and the popular will, thanks to a rightist Supreme Court.
Then there is the Electoral College, an anachronism that ensures that the candidate who gets the most votes nationally doesn’t necessarily win the presidency. That’s exactly what happened to Al Gore in 2000.
Next there is the Senate, which is undemocratic at a number of levels. It’s a system in which cows in Montana get the same representation as millions of people in states like California. As a result, the Senate is more representative of the race and ethnicity of mid-twentieth century America than that of 2012. That problem is exacerbated when Republicans are in power, for in the last forty years the GOP has become not only the party of the right but also the party of the white. And even when the Republicans are in the minority, their use and misuse of undemocratic Senate rules allow forty Republicans, many of them representing states with tiny, almost all-white populations to frustrate the will of sixty Democrats, many of whom represent huge states with breathtaking ethnic diversity.
When Alexis de Tocqueville was writing his classic “Democracy in America” in the nineteenth century, the United States surely was the most democratic nation on Earth. It was the land of limitless opportunity and rags-to-riches tales. But in 2012, the condition of democracy in America is grim, and the outlook for the immediate future is even graver. A plethora of recent studies have shown, for instance, that today a person born in humble circumstances in Western Europe or Canada has a better chance of moving up the social scale than one born in the United States. That’s the fruit of four decades of GOP social policy amounting to a class war against the middle class and the poor. And the Republicans never tire of dreaming up new ways to limit democracy or widen inequality. All of the “tax reforms” championed by Republican presidential hopefuls and members of Congress favor the rich. The latest anti-democratic move by Republicans is the successful attempt in several state legislatures to create schemes intended to legally deny the vote to minorities and the poor.
You would think that the sustained class warfare of the handmaidens of the 1 percent, the Republican Party, would not stand a chance against the power of the 99 percent. So far, it hasn’t turned out that way. That’s a measure of the extent to which democracy in America has been replaced by plutocracy. The disappointment following the hope ignited by the 2008 election has shown that it will take more than a decent president and a Democratic Congress to break the back of plutocratic rule and unleash real democracy. It will take a major social and political upheaval, one that does not seem to be on the horizon.
