The biggest lie

You cannot turn on a cable news program for any length of time without watching people wringing their hands about the threat that we could “lose our democracy.” The concern is justified given the ongoing Republican project for installing a lock on political power by rigging the electoral system and stealing and cheating their way into the White House in every presidential election for an indefinite time.

The only problem is that the premise is wrong. The United States is not today and has never been a democracy. You cannot lose what you never had.

This is a heretical idea. Americans believe they live in a democracy. Generations of Americans have fought and died under that illusion. They believe it despite all the evidence to the contrary and notwithstanding the fact that the Founders made it no secret they had no intention of birthing a democracy. They were men of much greater than average wealth—in a country in which even most white people struggled as laborers, small farmers, and indentured servants—who carefully crafted a Republic with numerous and redundant guardrails to prevent the United States from becoming a democracy. These safeguards have worked for over 200 years.

As a small economic elite, the Founders feared “the tyranny of the majority,” especially the threat that the many could demand and obtain a “new deal,” specifically a more equal distribution of wealth. In the South, potentially the most endangered form of property was in the form of enslaved human beings. It was the basis of the economic system and a red line that a national democracy could not be allowed to cross.

Why do Americans believe we live in a democracy and always have? The system does contain important democratic elements such as elections. For most of the 20th century and until 2000, the Electoral College, which was established by the forgers of the nation as check against majority rule, seemed like a technicality. Candidates who won the popular vote also won in the Electoral College to the point that most Americans were not sure what the Electoral College was or how it worked.

All that changed in 2000 when George W. Bush won in the Electoral College and became president despite losing the popular vote by hundreds of thousands of votes. At the time it seemed an anomaly, a freak result, one more in a weird election that featured hanging chads that was ultimately decided by a fiercely contested case before the U.S. Supreme Court voting 5-4 along party and ideological lines.

But instead of an anomaly, 2000 was the beginning of a great divergence, the beginning of a trend that led to the divisiveness that today everyone recognizes. The civil rights movement created the illusion, and to some extent the reality, that we could be a multi-racial democracy at peace with itself. Several things contributed to this. All three Democratic party presidents since the civil rights movement were Southerners—Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Richard Nixon with his southern strategy and law and order rhetoric began the transformation of the GOP into the party of whites. This continued after Nixon was booted out, but later Republican presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush were careful to couch their appeals to the racist base of the party through dog-whistle and coded messages they hoped would not alienate moderate Republicans and independent voters.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 came as a deep shock that deepened the great diversion. The backlash cemented the status of the Republican party as the party of white identity. Many white voters did not sympathize with the Republican party, but a majority did, especially those for whom white identity was essential to their being and self-esteem, and for whom white supremacy was constitutive of the nation. Put differently, for them a multiracial America was no America at all. They remembered another America that existed only a few decades before, where white culture and the English language was supreme, partly in reality and partly in their memory.

Like a prospector, Donald Trump detected the politically rich lode of fear, grievance, resentment, and outright hatred lying close to the surface. To the proverbial “sleeping dogs lying,” he fed red meat rather than whistles. Soon he had them awake and snarling. They became his base, as loyal to their master as the most loyal canine.

Donald Trump won the presidency via the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote 65,853,514 (48.18 percent) to 62,984,428 (46.09 percent). This election showed how wide the great divergence had grown along with being a preview of the future. The divergence had been there since the beginning in the undemocratic aspects of the foundation, but like some archeological objects it was invisible until the explosion of the earthquake. Current GOP efforts to undermine what there is of democracy are being built on the democratic deficit that has always been there.

Despite thrashing Trump in the popular vote, Clinton did not contest the election. Trump, amazingly, shamelessly, did. He claimed he had won the popular vote but for several million “illegal immigrants” that had cast votes for Hillary. He set up a highly partisan commission to investigate the non-existent fraud and even this rigged process was unable to discover electoral cheating. The commission had to be disbanded.

The contrasting actions of Clinton and Trump following the 2016 election was a glimpse of what has subsequently become clear. The contest between Republicans and Democrats had become one between a rabid pit bull and a cocker spaniel.

Nothing demonstrates the undemocratic features of the political system like the Senate. The body is another formidable obstacle to popular democracy. Two Senators represent California’s 39.5 million people. Two Senators represent Wyoming with just under 600,000 people. The state with the smallest population has the same representation as the state with the largest.

Little wonder that Democrats are pessimistic about the 2022 and 2024 elections. The democratic deficit works for the Republicans. The Democrats are constitutionally unable to imagine fighting like rabid dogs. What they should do is an open question for which I do not have the answer. They better get creative and find a way around or through the fix because business as usual just won’t cut it.