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Busting the myth: America is no democracy!

Any keen observer of the infantile charade that played out in the US House of Representatives over the laughable inability to elect a Speaker would not fail to notice that contemporary American democratic politics daily resembles jungle politics more and more, openly shattering the long held, if erroneous, notion that America is the democratic exemplar for all to emulate. The legislative branch suffered paralysis and the number three position in the order of succession to US presidency was, for several weeks, vacant. America is now letting the world see its vaunted democracy for the elaborate hoax it has always been.

The popular myth that America is the epitome of liberal democracy has subsisted for so long its truthfulness is simply taken for granted. But like every lie that takes on the appearance of a self-evident truth requiring no proof if told and retold ad infinitum, this particular myth, that America is a democratic nation, has gone unchallenged for so long. But the real truth, surprisingly, is that America is not the democratic nation we have all been hoodwinked to believe. Truth, again, is that it has never really been at any time in its history. This will be hard to accept, and so I understand if nobody agrees with me. But follow me as I anchor my position, for space constraints, on just three variables.

I begin with a categorical assertion that America’s age-old claims of operating a “government of the people, by the people and for the people” is hocus pocus. America is governed neither according to democratic tenets nor even remotely by democrats but instead by cabals of fabulously wealthy oligarchs and plutocrats —– from the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against as far back as 1961 that keep America perpetually fighting wars across the globe, to big pharmaceutical corporations, trillion-dollar tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, “X” (formerly Twitter), multinational oil corporations, banking giants, special interest and powerful lobby groups like the National Rifle Association and the Israeli lobby, and to the corporate mass media, whose CEOs fund politicians and consequently leverage their formidable private economic power to hijack and insinuate themselves into national governance and political decision-making. They influence appointments into high level government positions in departments and agencies in which they have business and economic interests. They constitute the formidable “Selectorate”, and it is their candidates rather than those of the general electorate that are allowed to be elected into office to control the levers of state power on their behalf. Matter of fact, the electorate merely performs the drudgery of legitimizing at election time what the oligarchs and plutocrats had already decided for them, and become irrelevant till another election cycle! In reality, the notion that the people determine who governs them and how they are governed is nothing but a gargantuan hoax. I’d probably be in trouble for saying this!

How can a nation that for centuries constitutionally, legally and in actual practice barred large sections of its own population (Women, Blacks, Native Americans, etc.) from the adult suffrage be justly classified as democratic? May be only ‘selectively democratic’, except there is no such thing either. Women, though constituting a significant percentage of America’s population, didn’t have the legal right to vote until 1920, Blacks until 1964. Though the voting right had been formally given to Blacks after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 but its exercise was systematically subverted by Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory administrative practices, and was not restored until 1964. Till date, the people of Puerto Rico, though tax-paying Americans, cannot take part in electing a US president. Essentially, today’s America, with a vast arsenal of coercive instruments and surveillance measures that put a lie to the enjoyment of citizens’ freedom, is unquestionably a super surveillance state masquerading as a democracy.

If democracy is a form of government in which all adults are entitled to vote, how come there is also the Electoral College, a system that is so patently undemocratic but empowers a small clique of unelected “electors” to choose a president for the people, sometimes even denying real winners of highest electoral votes their freely given mandates, as happened to former Vice President Al Gore against George W. Bush in 2020, and Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in 2016? So, what happens to the so-called power of the electorate to choose their presidents?

The second variable concerns America being a military-imperialist nation. And military-imperialism and democracy cannot coexist, so the American empire can hardly be democratic at home, much less abroad. To talk of an empire as a democracy is laughable oxymoron because democrats do not build empires, only authoritarians and tyrants do! So, the American empire, indisputably the greatest empire in recorded history with unmatched global military, political, diplomatic, economic and technological reach since the end of the Second World War, dominates and exploits the rest of the world for its own selfish national interests. Aside its history of slave trade and inhuman exploitation, let’s us not also forget its contemporary imperialistic wars and conquests, all of these taking place while still making all the sanctimonious preachments about democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms, equality and such other crap.

Hardly any Western nation is a democracy in the real sense. Britain and France for example asserted after WWI that the right to self-determination that they were preaching did not apply to colonial peoples who must remain under colonial bondage. Even after the Second World War, the millions of Africans who died helping the European nations to defend their democracy and freedoms against Hitler’s Third Reich were not entitled to their own freedom, and Winston Churchill would order the most horrendous persecution of the Kikuyu in Kenya for having the temerity to demand independence. His justification was that he had not been appointed the first minister in Her Majesty’s government to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire! So much for liberal democratic states which still cohabit very comfortably with toxic neocolonialism and are the least incommoded plundering the underdeveloped countries of the global south for their own sybaritism while still hypocritically claiming to promoting the freedom, equality and human rights of all.

America and its Western allies only spread democracy across the globe by imposition and compellence, i.e., usually by a combination of force, coercion, intimidation, subterfuge, blackmail, cajolery, threats of withholding critical development aid, grants and loans, sometimes mounting outright invasion to cause regime change. It is often asserted that democracies don’t fight wars. So, since America not only regularly fight wars across the globe, but actually makes war-making its principal national interest, it therefore does not qualify to be classified as a democracy. And the arms manufacturers and their paid mouthpieces recklessly promote warmongering to keep America perpetually busy so they can make their own money. For example, in the past two decades alone, America has invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, bombed several others like Sudan and Somalia, and has been destabilizing Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and others. It has expended over $130 billion dollars in weapons and other war supplies to Ukraine in under two years in the guise of helping to protect its “democracy and freedom”, even though they know that Ukraine was never a democracy but the most corrupt country in Europe held in thrall by neo-Nazi oligarchs!

Again, how democratic is the US when its presidents regularly authorizes CIA operatives to assassinate foreign leaders, cause chaos and ruin their nations in the process —– Patrice Lumumba, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Omar Torrijos, Salvador Allende, Muammar Gaddafi, Qassim Sulemani, the list is just too long. How democratic is an America that carried out no fewer than 64 regime changes in the Cold War years alone, and has never ceased to authorize foreign assassination and drone strikes that cold-bloodedly murder scores of innocent men, women and children?

But let’s for a moment see how thoroughly messed up US domestic politics has been in recent decades where rudimentary civility and decorum hitherto associated with politicking have been replaced by toxic manners; where electioneering is war, with combatants taking no prisoners; where insurrection is termed “legitimate political discourse,” where the White House and the executive branch are controlled by neocons and special interests; where the Congress is held hostage to the depredations of the armament industry, NRA and other special interests and lobbies; where relationship between the executive and legislature is ever so adversarial that the latter has no compunction shutting down government operations by refusing to approve appropriations, thereby holding the peoples’ welfare and livelihood hostage to the personal political interests of legislators. America would rather vote billions of dollars for foreign wars than for the welfare of poor and vulnerable Americans.

People should stop looking to America as a democratic exemplar, as a bastion of democracy, for it is not. Let each nation or society design democratic paths suitable and adaptable to their own circumstances instead of slavishly aping America’s thoroughly chaotic and undemocratic system.