CARTOON -- AMERICA'S BIGGEST SCAM: Minority Rule Is Threatening American 'Democracy' Like Never Before
Voting for president of the United States would be like working at Walmart and getting to vote for your new department manager from a list of candidates sent down from corporate headquarters.
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
There is a reason — many reasons — of why the will, needs and rights of the citizens are completely irrelevant in the Corporate State of America.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (4/17/24)
If there is one thing that wears on me more than anything else in our current national political fart fighting are lofty references to “American democracy”. Whether it is Joe Biden perverting the concept to justify support for the Gaza genocide as a fight for democracy or Donald Trump pretending to have ever heard of the idea.
The recent renewal of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — which got an Orwellian makeover back in the Cheney/G.W. Bush years, literally stripping away our Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections is matched by the now routine targeting of First Amendment free speech rights of anyone with the temerity to even hint that the U.S.-funded and armed Israeli Zionist fascist genocide in Gaza is criminal.
As the famous 2014 Princeton University study “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” concluded:
“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”
Or to put it in blunter, less erudite language: Voting for president of the United States would be like working at Walmart and getting to vote for your new department manager from a list of candidates sent down from corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Such a nice gesture, but the real bosses are always outside the building.
Mockery of democracy from the get-go
The current edition of Mother Jones magazine features an excerpt from Ari Berman’s latest book: “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack On The Will Of The People And the fight To Resist It”.
Berman tracks the history of the false front facade of America’s mockery of democracy to the founding of the nation. Given the founders were a clique of white monied landowners, family scions and a fair amount of depraved and brutal slave holders, it should be no surprise that the institution of the US government is anchored in the task of protecting unearned mega wealth and undeserved snooty privilege.
Berman dissects how coddling of the American oligarchy was guaranteed with planted constitutional trip wires and legal time bombs we see going off now as the supposedly vaunted “will of the people” is irrelevant to everything from US policy in the Israeli Gaza genocide to calls for national healthcare, higher taxes on our leaching upper class to such basic citizen rights as free education and a living wage. There is a reason — many reasons — Berman details of why the will, needs and rights of the citizens are completely irrelevant in the Corporate State of America.
As the clock ticks down to fascist end times, the Mother Jones Berman excerpt is a much-needed review and wake-up call and guide to how we got where we are.
[Berman is a contributing writer at The Nation and an investigative reporting fellow for The Nation Institute.]
“The founders, in ways they could not have anticipated, placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of American politics.”
By Ari Berman
Mother Jones (May/June 2024)
A day ahead of the third anniversary of January 6, President Joe Biden traveled to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania—where George Washington encamped during the Revolutionary War—before delivering what he described as a “deadly serious” speech framing the stakes of the 2024 election. Biden wanted to show how Donald Trump, by inciting the insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 results, had violated the most basic principles in a democracy: free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.
“Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions,” Biden said. “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.” The alternative, Biden said, was “dictatorship—the rule of one, not the rule of ‘We the People.’” That fundamental tenet of American democracy was gravely imperiled, Biden warned: “We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”
This story is adapted from Ari Berman’s new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, which will be published April 23.
That’s undoubtedly true. But the crisis Biden described—and the choice facing the nation this November—is much older and deeper than Trump. A determined minority has been trying to shape the foundations of American governance for their own benefit since the inception of the republic. For more than two centuries, a fierce struggle has played out between forces seeking to constrict democracy and those seeking to expand it. In 2024, the country is once again immersed in a pivotal battle over whom the political system should serve and represent.
Majority rule and minority rights
From childhood, we are taught to venerate the Constitution as a civic religion, but the truth is that America’s democratic experiment has been defined since the nation’s founding by a central tension over whom the government should favor. The United States has historically been a laboratory for both oligarchy and genuine democracy. And to grasp the present-day fight, one must understand the long-standing clash between competing notions of majority rule and minority rights.
In 1790, the country’s most populous state, Virginia, had 12 times as many people as its least populous, Delaware. Today, California has 67 times the population of Wyoming. Fifteen small states with 41 million people combined now routinely elect 30 GOP senators; California, with 39 million residents, is represented by only two Democrats. This imbalance is growing more lopsided: By 2040, roughly 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30 percent—who are whiter, older, and more rural than the country as a whole—will elect 70 senators.
The founders, despite the lofty ideals in the Declaration of Independence, designed the Constitution in part to check popular majorities and protect the interests of a propertied white upper class. The Senate was created to represent the country’s elite and boost small states while restraining the more democratic House of Representatives. The Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of small states and slave states. The makeup of the Supreme Court was a product of these two undemocratic institutions. But as the United States has democratized in the centuries since, extending the vote and many other rights to formerly disenfranchised communities, the antidemocratic features built into the Constitution have become even more pronounced, to the point that they are threatening the survival of representative government in America. …
“Like dry rot on a decaying house, the imbalances built into the electoral system keep getting worse. Things that once seemed to be an aberration, like a candidate losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College, are now routine. Before the 2000 election, only three times in US history had the loser of the popular vote won the Electoral College. But that’s happened twice in 16 years since then. It almost occurred a third time in 2020, when Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes but Trump lost the three closest states in the Electoral College by just 44,000 total votes.”
— Ari Berman, Minority Rule
And other western countries are like this too. We're no longer living in democracies.