Our Democracy Stinks & You Want to Save It?

How the Democrats screw themselves again and again and again...

Democrats need to stop talking about “saving democracy.” Not only does it do them no good, but I think that it hurts the party. Why? Because the “democracy” that they propose “saving” is severely damaged and not very representative, and that’s the way it’s been for a long, long, long time.

The United States was founded as a limited democracy. Per the US Constitution, Americans at the country’s founding could only vote if they were White men of property. Slaves and indentured servants could not vote. Native people could not vote. Most people of color could not vote. Women could not vote. The poor and propertyless could not vote.

Additionally, a good portion of the population (Native people, POCs, women) were considered property and/or barely human and were denied property rights, freedom of speech, free movement, legal standing, and any agency in their lives. This is how democracy worked until just after the Civil War, when in 1865, Reconstruction assured Black Americans – mostly former slaves – the vote.

Reconstruction’s opening of democracy lasted only 12 years. A series of compromises and sell-outs by White politicians ended Reconstruction and sunk America into the Nadir of African American History, a period that spanned from 1877 to the early 1900s. A nadir is a low-point, which begs the question, how could a time period after slavery be the low-point in African American history?

America’s slave years were dark and disgusting times, when Black people were owned by White people and had relatively no freedom. That was undisputed, a fact of life acknowledged by both Black people and White people, by both slavers and abolitionists, by both North and South. Everyone knew the rules, everyone knew their subscribed roles, everyone knew what the status quo was and would be in the days to come.

That acknowledgement does not mean that everyone accepted slavery as right or desirable. Many didn’t, especially slaves, who fomented rebellions soon after they were kidnapped and shipped to America. From 1776 to the Civil War, there were as many as 311 known slave revolts, more if you count mutinies, individual acts of violence against slavers, and escapes. Harriet Tubman, herself, is credited to leading more than 300 enslaved people out of the South through the Underground Railroad. Though we’ve been taught little about these revolts, they were pivotal in the fight to end slavery.

When the North beat the South in the Civil War, Reconstruction was instituted to guarantee Black Americans and former slaves’ freedom. Through the vote, Black American men took over Southern state legislatures, one of several things that inspired White backlash, led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and agitation to end Reconstruction.

White terrorism was too strong and White political will too weak to save Reconstruction. In 1877, Reconstruction was done, American troops sent back home, and power returned to the South’s Antebellum elite, the former slaveholders. The Reconstruction Amendments, scorned by today’s conservatives and the right, were left unenforced.

While freed Black people didn’t return to slavery, they had most of their rights stripped from them. What the law didn’t restrict, violence and terrorism did. Blacks in America went from slavery to a freedom full of “hope and promise” to some political and economic power to having everything taken away from them…again. A combination of lack of freedom, extreme disappointment, and no more hope made for the low-point, the Nadir of African American History.

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, farmers organized in Granges to fight monopoly power held by railroads, slaughterhouses, and wholesalers – all owned rich men who pretty much owned the political system. Women continued their fight for the vote and other rights. Workers started organizing in labor unions. And in this frenzy of activity, Black Americans started to fight what was to become Jim Crow, forming the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted women full voting rights, though it took some time for women to be able to exercise their rights. The same goes for Black Americans, who fought laws and bullshit, suffered discrimination and violence, and still fought to secure the rights that they were granted.

Mass protests led by Black Americans, political activism, and the assassination of President Kennedy led Lyndon Johnson to force Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which theoretically made the United States a fully-functioning democracy. Problem is that while voting rights were expanded, the system itself had and has major problems, starting with the Electoral College, a relic of slavery that gives small, rural states far more power than their population size would dictate.

The structure of the United States Senate (and many state legislatures) also limits democracy by rewarding all states two senators each, again, regardless of their population. Thus, California, with its 39.5 million residents, has as much power in the Senate as Wyoming, which has 587,000 people, a bit more than Fresno, California’s fifth largest city.

Further, our electoral system is set up to favor no more than two major political parties. Ballot requirements make it difficult for independent candidates to thrive or even compete. Structures outside of government – specifically corporate media and political parties – limit public knowledge of most things not Republican or Democratic. Plus, the right-wing still works to suppress voting by people of color.

And then there is money. Over the last few decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that spending money on politics is speech and that corporations have the same rights of people (personhood), two things that led to weakening and then a total trashing of campaign finance regulations. Currently, Big Money has very few restrictions that stop it from dominating the political system, especially elections. What restrictions exist are rarely enforced, thanks to starving the Federal Election Commission of funding.

Which is how we get The Richest Man in the World spending $250 million to elect Donald Trump in the last election (that’s 0.0625% of his net worth, the equivalent of $625 for the average American). In San Francisco, New Yorker Mike Bloomberg gave Mayor London Breed $1 million for her failed reelection campaign, chump change for him, lifechanging money for the rest of us.

In any other country, all this shit would be called corruption, but we soft peddle it, if we talk about it at all. Instead of debating what we must do to build a healthy democracy, we babble on about “saving” a democracy that is barely more than a referendum on what representative of wealth we want to rule us while ignoring the fundamental things that we need – affordable food and shelter, meaningful work, clean air and water, environmental sanity, economic equity. Our call for safe streets results in more cops and fewer restrictions on police, not less guns or more mental health services or drug treatment programs or anything that would make people feel safe in their communities while dealing with some of society’s pathologies.

I certainly understand that we must save what democracy we have, not because our system is desirable or works, but because once it is gone, the fight to create a new democracy, in any form, will take decades and probably involve much violence. It is far more prudent and wiser to save what we have and fix what we can of it than to let it die.

That said, running political campaigns based on “saving democracy” as it is without admitting that our democracy is a sack of shit rigged to benefit the wealthy status quo and proposing solid, doable things which would start to snuff money power, well, that is pure folly. Listen, I’m a middle-aged White guy, and, while I don’t have money, the system is designed for me to exploit, and I feel like it is rigged against me. Most people do, especially all the people who really feel its inequities and those being told that it is rigged against them. That’s a whole lot of people from every demographic and across the political spectrum.

But, but, but the only major politicians saying that our democracy is rigged are Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. And though what they mean by rigged is different, the words, on their face, are true and resonate with people. Donald Trump is president-elect and the head of one of the two major political parties. Sanders is a senator but, as an independent and because of his politics, essentially an outsider. They speak to what a lot – if not most of – us believe about the health of our democracy. They speak for us and we identify with them, or at least one of democracy’s critics – Trump or Sanders. We want change and they promise change.

This puts the Democrats in the position of defenders of a rigged democracy, an unpopular position that solidifies the idea that Democrats are out-of-touch elitists. Forget that many Democrats want to “save democracy” for the same reasons I do. They aren’t spelling it out like I am. They simply bleat “Save Democracy! Save Democracy!” and assume that what they are saying is good and wise and that we all understand what they mean.

A lot of what the Democrats do is out of habit and what they don’t do out of habit, they do out of fear. Clearly stating that our democracy is rigged, how it is rigged, who it benefits and how to change it is something that they do not do because they do not want to be accused of running down America. Its why Democrats retreat quickly on criminal justice and civil rights issues once the “anti-American” blowback comes. Its why they spend so much time talking about “working across the aisle” with people who want to kill them. Its why they dance with the Cheney family. Its why they have been rope-a-doped by true elitists into being “the elite.”

The fix here is simple. Start telling it like it really is. Follow Bernie Sanders’s example. Listen to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Look at Barbara Lee’s career. Dive deeper and study the service of Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, Henry Gonzalez, Maxine Waters, Bella Abzug, Vito Marcantonio, and other lawmakers. Shun these people and deny this history, and Democrats are done.