The election of 2024, progressives declared, was going to save democracy.
According to the outcome, a hell of a lot of people didn’t give a fuck.
When we praise democracy, we focus on all the great and salient aspects: that every individual counts, that we are all created equal, endowed with equal rights and privileges. In fact, it’s often been taught that democracy came about to protect the masses from the rich and powerful.
And yet, after the colonials split with King George, democracy wasn’t really the first thing on the minds of our founders. The Federalist Papers’ central theme was a prevention of democracy, a prevention of rule by majority. In fact, these papers advocated for a commercial republic, one whose foremost duty was to protect commerce and property.
Can you imagine what went through their minds at that time? The wealthy and powerful?
“I’m rich. Look at the bounty I’ve amassed here in this new land. And now we’re going to create a democracy that can redistribute my wealth to the beggars? A democracy that takes away my political clout and gives it to a mere school teacher?”
Our Constitution was glaringly racist with its Three-Fifths Compromise favoring landowners over slaves who counted as just three fifths of a person.
Only landowners could vote, and the president was selected by an elite Electoral College, designed to protect the government from an unruly mob. Our forefathers finally agreed in a compromise that we should not be ruled by a majority . . . in other words, democracy was not on the table.
An historical note is: Nothing our forefathers worried about or predicted would happen ever happened. And the election of 2024 has proved them incontrovertibly mistaken. Remember that unruly mob of January 6th, 2021? Well, they won the election of 2024. Our Constitution has not protected the people from that hypothetical “unruly mob.”
Initially, democracy came about to give everyone an equal say in their government. It was designed to protect the people from the wealthy and powerful. But our Constitution first protected the wealthy, and as the concept of democracy began taking hold, and slaves got the right to vote, then women got the right to vote, the wealthy started losing their grip on power and so they labeled democracy “communism.”
The massive propaganda efforts to use “communism” to scare the shit out of people began and the people did shit themselves.
At first, it was the uneducated that feared this illusory communism. The communist movement peaking in the fifties was simply a reaction against the wealthy owning everything, including the power, who had being fighting tooth and nail against the socialist facets of the New Deal . . . which just happened to bring us out of the depression and establish guardrails preventing future depressions.
When the moneyed can mount a campaign so huge as to scare the little man, making him think that what he has and what he has worked for is being taken from him and given to his lessers, that little man is going to vote against his own self-interests.
And now you know why a minimum wage is no longer a living wage; why we don’t have universal health care; why hospitals, medicine, and prisons are not part of “the commons,” why our prisons are filled to capacity; why social security barely keeps the elderly alive (and why it’s now on the table awaiting cuts), why the wage gap continues to grow while the workers (whose production has not faltered but continues to grow) are living paycheck to paycheck.
The wealthy have found an excellent and surefire method of persuading the common person to vote against their own self-interests, against their taxes expanding their safety net, against the democracy that was supposed to protect them in the first place.
And the Constitution has not protected the masses from an unruly mob taking over the government.
The Constitution doesn’t seem to be protecting us at all.
It certainly didn’t protect us from voters being purged from the registration lists in some states.
The United States of America has long been called “The Great Experiment.” It’s time to end that bullshit. The experiment has failed. Obviously it was designed to fail. We are an oligarchy, a plutocracy. The republic has failed.
