Drop “democracy” from our rhetoric about America

The word democracy appears regularly in Americans’ discourse about our country. We describe our government as democratic, and our political rhetoric is filled with notions of democracy about many aspects of American life.

But, in this age of originalist analysis let’s apply a little to this matter.

The word “democracy” has two Greek roots, demos and kratos, common people and rule, respectively — government by the people.  Let’s turn back to the proverbial founding fathers and the laws they had in place regarding who might be the participants in government. In 1789, most states only allowed white men who owned property or paid taxes to vote. So, from its very founding, America was not a democracy. We tell ourselves the story of the expansion of voting rights over the next 200 years. At this point, we must have achieved universal suffrage? Indeed, in the wake of Trump’s insurrection, we reassure ourselves that our voting systems are secure. So, maybe we do have a democratic form of government?

We won’t venture into a discussion of Gerrymandering voting districts as a playground of state legislatures and specialized software packages that are available to rent for as little as $1,299 per year. Anyone who bothers to look at a map of electoral districts knows that something funny is going on.

We need to look a bit more deeply into the state of our affairs. Are corporations human beings? Should they have the same rights as human beings? The Supreme Court has decided that this is so. And, to make this nonsense and overwhelming fact in our “democracy“ more troubling, the Supreme Court has determined that there can be no limits on the “speech” of these new elements of our species. More incredibly, according to the Supreme Court, money is speech, so we have a tsunami of corporate speech dominating our political system.

Lobbyists ensure that the interests of the rich and corporations are carefully protected through legislation and regulations. There are 435 members of Congress and 100 Senators. In 2021, there were 12,136 registered lobbyists in Washington, supported by over $3.73 billion to influence legislation and regulations. That amounts to $6,972,000 and 23 lobbyists per legislator. The situation in state and local governments is not dissimilar.

The impact of all this money has been empirically demonstrated in research by Martin Gilens and others, which clearly shows the significant bias in law and regulation towards government actions to further the interests of the rich and corporations. From the summary of this research, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.…economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.”¹

Many policy proposals have widespread public support that are never even discussed, let alone voted on in Congress or the Senate. For example:

• Expanding Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing coverage
• Increasing federal funding for counseling for people with mental illness
• Legalizing abortion when the woman’s health is endangered by pregnancy
• Increasing federal funding for the expansion of high-speed internet in rural areas
• Providing federal grants to cities to develop affordable housing
• Capping rent increases that landlords can charge in homes built in part with federal funding
• Requiring companies to provide paid sick leave for full-time employees
• Increasing federal funding for long-term care for the elderly
• Expanding federal tax credits for childcare expenses
• and many more²

The role of private and corporate money, much of it anonymous, in elections has very perverse outcomes for Congressmen and Senators. They must spend more time raising money than legislating.³ This forces them to spend lots of time talking to people in the top 1% of the wealth pile. In appealing to this crowd’s interests, they rarely speak with people in the bottom 90% of the population.

The rich and corporations understand the day-to-day mechanics of government. So, they target resources to have a direct hand in how a newly passed law is converted into the rules and regulations that implement it. Then, they embed themselves in the bureaucracy to view and influence the daily operations of regulatory agencies. Some agencies even adopt the cultural styles of the industries they are regulating. The story of Boeing’s development of its 737 Max aircraft with the ensuing crash of two of these planes is frequently cited as an example of regulatory capture. In this case, the Federal Aviation Administration depended on Boeing engineers for information and substituted their judgments for their own technical experts.⁴

Former Wall Street trader Max Keiser described this system as a “self-reinforcing malfeasance machine.”⁵ Each round of changes in the rules of the game produces more significant returns and then more lobbying to maintain control of the political system.

Majority Rule?

The notion that a majority vote decides issues in a democracy is a fairly bedrock concept. It is embedded in the idea of democracy. However, the Federal government’s structure is profoundly anti-democratic. In accordance with their original intent and facts, the Founding Fathers gave up the foundational principle of democratic rule, which states that a majority of votes settles issues. In the Senate, each state has two senators, regardless of their population size.⁶ The ten least populous states have a total population of 9.6 million. California, the most populous state, has 39.2 million people. Ten sparsely populated states, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, and New Hampshire, have 20 Senators. On average, each of these Senators represents 479,000 people. Meanwhile, California’s two Senators represent 19,600,000 people EACH. As if their dominance in voting power is not enough, the Senate has long had the Cloture Rule that requires 60 Senators to vote affirmatively to end debate and bring an issue to an up or down vote. So, the 21 states with the lowest populations, 80 million people, can control government policy regardless of the effects on the other 253 million people.

What Kind of Government Do We Have?

So, the word “democracy” is clearly not applicable to the US. What words might one use to describe it? Here are a few candidates:

• Plutocracy – a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income
• Oligarchy – rule by a small group, often wealthy or privileged individuals.
• Aristocracy – government by a hereditary or privileged class, though this term can imply a broader elite beyond just the wealthy.
• Wealthocracy – informal or less common term for rule by the wealthy.
• Kleptocracy – rule by leaders who exploit national resources and wealth for personal gain, though it has a corrupt connotation.
• Crony capitalism – a system where wealthy individuals or businesses influence political decisions to their advantage.

I will let you decide which is favored. Just don’t use the word “democracy” to refer to the US government.

1. Gilens, Martin. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, N.J; New York: Princeton University Press ; Russell Sage Foundation, 2012.; and Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. ” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (September 2014): 564–81. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595 . This article has been cited over 3,250 times by other scholars.
2. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50343-national-policy-proposals-with-bipartisan-support
3. Listen to the four part podcast on This American Life, “Take the Money and Run for Office” (3/30/2012) https://www.thisamericanlife.org/461/take-the-money-and-run-for-office
4. Cassidy, John. “How Boeing and the F.A.A. Created the 737 MAX Catastrophe.” The New Yorker, September 17, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-boeing-and-the-faa-created-the-737-max-catastrophe.
5. From Four Horsemen, Documentary (Renegade, 2012). 41 minutes
6. Some will complain that this was a necessary compromise to assure that all thirteen colonies would sign on to the new constitution. What to say about the strength of democratic principles amongst the Founding Fathers that this was their solution?