America Is Not a Democracy

 

“Democrats have spent much—some might say all—of the last two presidential elections warning about the threats to democracy embodied by Donald Trump. The 2024 election is already being pitched not as a choice about taxes or health care or social policy, but a final test of whether we will have a republic or a dictatorship.

“Trump is a more than worthy subject of concern for anyone hoping for democracy in 2025. Last time he was president, he actively resisted the peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of despots the world over. To the extent he and his authoritarian-friendly advisers learned anything from the first term, it was how to neutralize obstacles to expanding power. His musing about being a “dictator on day one” is really not loose talk. The plans emanating from Team Trump to destroy the civil service, hire government lawyers to rubber-stamp unconstitutional actions and prosecute personal enemies, and even deploy troops on American soil are truly alarming.

“But something troubles me about that term, ‘threat to democracy.’ It has become a catchall phrase for resistance to conservative extremism, and specifically Trump. Yet the deficiencies in American democracy go back to the very founding, and the long arc of history hasn’t come close to correcting all of them. The larger crisis we now face is not solely attributable to an individual with malign intent for our government; it’s more about the system of government itself.

“Exactly what part of democracy are we trying to save? Is it our democratic legislature, gerrymandered and malapportioned beyond recognition, with supermajority thresholds that deny rule even by that corrupted majority? Is it our democratic presidency, which Trump legally took over after losing the popular vote in 2016, and George W. Bush in the same fashion 16 years earlier? Is it our democratic judiciary, morphed into a super-legislature and habitually twisting the Constitution to advantage those with power, money, and influence?

“Are we worried about a democracy that can be so easily purchased, where corporate lobbyists either win whatever they want on Capitol Hill, or win by regulatory change or international trade treaty whatever they don’t? Has this government, where the most important modification of our democracy’s original sin, the second-class citizenship of Black people, is now being steadily reversed by state legislatures and the courts, earned our support? Is there despair over losing something that has produced unequal opportunity, unequal justice, and the conversion of economic power into political power? Where can we find this democracy we need to fight to preserve?

“No democracy perfectly distills the will of the people. But America is uniquely terrible at achieving democratic outcomes. It’s worth focusing our energies to repair that, because the alternative really is too grim to contemplate. But there are only a few options here. We can defend ‘democracy’ as an amorphous concept that this country has almost never lived up to. We can uncover escape hatches, short-term circumventions of the rules, either to disqualify Trump and the threat he represents, or to take action on policy challenges. We know the names of these band-aids: budget reconciliation, the Electoral Count Reform Act, the 14th Amendment.

“But we don’t deserve to live as political Houdini figures, trying constantly to work our way out of shackles imposed on us by our own system of government. If a political movement is going to style itself as the savior of democracy, it should also speak plainly about the myriad deficiencies in our democracy, and what it would actually take to fix them.

“AMERICAN DEMOCRACY ISN’T VERY SUCCESSFUL not despite being the world’s oldest, but because of that fact. The Founding Fathers—primarily aristocrats, land speculators, and slaveholders—had noble aspirations but limited belief in true democracy. They distrusted agglomerations of power, whether in a monarch, political parties, or the people. As historian Terry Bouton has written, Founders like Alexander Hamilton and Elbridge Gerry detested an ‘excess of democracy’ that could lead to a dangerous outbreak of economic equality.

“They thus devised a system built for a small, agrarian country, intended to make addressing social challenges extremely difficult. Presidents don’t get to form the government, and the legislature responsible for enacting the laws is elected at different times. The framers wanted the House, Senate, and presidency to compete with one another, to curb each other’s power, and in that competition to disable the desires of the people, even if they constituted a majority. Montesquieu, the French philosopher who inspired the founders to build a system of checks and balances, hoped a government so conceived ‘should naturally form a state of repose or inaction.’

“The biggest tell of how misaligned this approach is for the modern world is that, when we periodically overthrow perceived enemies and install what we call democracies in other countries, we almost never use the core aspects of our own system. The federal government of Iraq has a figurehead president and a parliament, with the prime minister as the head of government. Democracies installed after World War II in Germany and Japan and Italy were given a similar framework.

“In a parliamentary structure, the head of government runs the legislature. Coalitions can collapse, but then snap elections are held for a new majority that can adopt its platform. America can have divided government indefinitely; since 1980, the presidency and both houses of Congress have been in the same hands for only 12 years and six months (from January to June 2001, after which a party switch flipped the Senate), with the other 31 and a half years divided. Both Congress and the president can claim popular mandates to thwart the other, leading to unsatisfying stasis at best and perpetual crisis at worst.

“In the last nine national elections, America has changed at least one house of Congress or the presidency every time except for 2012. More than half of those elections were landslides: 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, and 2018. Legislative action in those two decades in no way matches these successive Democratic and Republican mandates. Bipartisan fetishism aside, there are real differences of opinion in America, which should be settled through elections. But voters keep electing a new party to fulfill promises that are blocked by the structure of the political system and its status quo bias…

“Filibustering lawmakers no longer need to speak to wield the minority veto; they can just lodge an objection to shut things down. Even relatively uncontroversial votes can take days, regardless of support, as long as one senator is determined enough to oppose it. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) blocked hundreds of perfunctory military promotions for months over Pentagon abortion policy; confirming each promotion separately would grind the Senate to a halt. Lawmakers in the minority know this, so they take every opportunity to run out the clock…

“Between 71 and 98 percent of U.S. federal elections over the past 20 years were determined by which candidate had the most campaign money. This was enabled by a judiciary that allowed corporations to be considered people for purposes of equal protection under the law, a constitutional provision intended to safeguard the rights of Black former slaves. Corporations later obtained what amount to free speech rights in the Citizens United case, part of a decades-long approach, as writer Corey Robin has explained, to reorient the practices of ‘the businessman and the banker’ as speech.

“With creative interpretations and invented doctrines, the Supreme Court has reorganized itself into a second legislature, rendering an additional veto over laws it doesn’t like. The key strategists behind this new order like to use the term ‘originalism,’ linking their perversion of democracy’s present to the inadequate structures of the past.

“Every action the government takes is now viewed through the lens of potential infringement on corporate rights, pulverizing the will of policymakers, who regulate and enforce with an eye toward not getting sued. And corporations are in the room where it happens. Government lobbying cost over $1 billion in just the first three months of 2023. When the Dodd-Frank Act passed—with the tailwind of a world-historic financial crisis enabling a muted reform to barely gain enough votes—lobbyists from the financial services industry called it ‘halftime,’ and set about to shape the rules derived from the law in their interest, mostly successfully.

“There have certainly been moments in American history when concentrations of economic power were seen as dangerous; we’re living through the resurrection of one of those moments right now. But the relinquishing of antitrust enforcement over nearly half a century prior has given large corporations far too much political power in our democracy. Indeed, the very act of concentrating business sectors leads to a loss of basic, inalienable rights: the liberty to pursue your talents or discover new inventions without being muscled out by an economic leviathan…”

-David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’

The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online, the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue.

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