Thankful to live in a democracy?
On this Thanksgiving weekend, many of us express gratitude to live in a country like the U.S. One of the core reasons many say (aside from greater economic opportunity and our plethora of freedoms – speech, religion, the press and the like) is that we live in a democracy. But do we actually?
A democracy is a system of government in which the power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives. Incorporated within that concept is that every adult citizen has a say in the form of a vote AND that their vote is equal to the vote of every other citizen, regardless of their wealth, background, race, gender, age or where they happen to live. And yet our system of electing folks to represent us has evolved to run directly counter to that core principle. Let’s look at each of our branches of government.
In the presidential election, the electoral college system converts the actual votes of citizens into votes by electors who vote all or nothing (with a few minor exceptions) for the candidate who wins the popular vote in each particular state, regardless of the margin of the vote. As a result, as we have all seen recently, a candidate can win the votes of a majority of American citizens and still lose the election. That was thought to be an aberration in the 1800’s when both Rutherford Hayes and Benjamin Harrison won the electoral vote and became President despite garnering thousands of less votes than their opponents. It didn’t happen at all in the 1900’s but then in 2000, George Bush defeated Al Gore despite Gore receiving over 500,000 more votes. But then it happened again only 16 years later when Trump became President despite the fact that 2.8 MILLION more Americans voted for his opponent!
Aside from resulting in the election of a president that a meaningful majority of Americans opposed, this system also serves to disenfranchise the majority of our citizens. The votes of most people in this country (from Texas to New York) have been rendered essentially meaningless, as their state’s predilection for Democrat or Republican is pretty much etched in stone. The election, therefore, is routinely left to the decision by a relatively small number of people in just a few swing states. There is no justification in a democracy that votes of folks who live in Ohio and Florida should “count more” than folks from other places, or that they alone get to decide who is President anytime the election is remotely close.
Next, there is the undemocratic design of the Senate. The notion that every state should get two senators to give the smaller states a better voice may have made some sense at the time when the nation was composed of only 13 states and the size difference between the largest and smallest was relatively modest. But the idea was to protect the small states from tyranny by the larger states, not to give the small states a massive advantage or outright control in governing our nation. The concept makes no practical sense today when there are 50 states, and a wide disparity in the populations of those states. There is no good reason why the views of citizens and politicians from states with tiny populations – like Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota and the like – should dominate and dictate our laws. Indeed, if you combine the population of the 22 least populous states, they collectively do not equal the population of California. And yet those states collectively have 44 senators while California merely has two. There is nothing remotely “democratic” about this.
Some say that’s taken into account and balanced out by the composition of the House of Representatives, which gives more representatives to the larger states. The problem is that these bodies are not equal. The Senate has significant powers that the House lacks- the most important of which is the ability to confirm important appointees, including Supreme Court Justices who can determine laws for a half century.
As for the composition of the House of Representatives – the so-called “people’s branch of government,” it also does not accurately reflect the true will of the people. Through gerrymandering and other sneaky political maneuvers, states controlled by one side or the other, manufacture congressional boundary lines out of thin air to maximize the number of representatives their party receives, which serves to undermine the will of the people. For example, North Carolina is a state where the citizens lean Republican but are fairly closely divided. Indeed, in the last election, neither candidate eclipsed 50% – Trump received approximately 49% of the vote and Clinton about 46%. And yet, the congressional delegation from North Carolina is massively Republican- 10 members to 3. Why? Because districts have been drawn by a Republican-controlled state government to cram democratic voters into a couple of districts. The same is true in the key swing state of Ohio- where the people are almost equally split between Democrat and Republican, but the Congressional delegation is 75% Republican (12 seats to 4). To be fair, Maryland, a state that leans Democrat but not massively so, has done a similar thing to favor Democrats. Regardless of which party is doing it, this process is further eroding democracy in the so-called people’s body.
As for the judicial branch, it was designed to be an independent and fair interpreter of the law and a check on the power of the other branches- to help foster democracy. However, the two governmental entities that control who serves on our federal judiciary are the President who appoints them, and the Senate who confirms them. Since neither of these is democratically chosen, the Judiciary cannot be a good reflection of democracy either.
Moreover, the founding fathers envisioned that judges would be selected for their intelligence, legal acumen, integrity and independence. Instead, in the insatiable quest for control and greater power, far too many judges are selected precisely because of their political views- i.e. their LACK of independence. I’m sure that this would come as a shock to our founding fathers, along with the newest selection criteria- age, or rather, the lack thereof. This way judges can serve and effect the law long after a political party is in vogue or power.
So, once again, a disproportionally small number of citizens – through their chosen elected representatives – effectively gets to dictate the laws, rights and liberties for the rest of us for generations. How does that make any sense? How is that fair? How is that democratic?
And then there are the numerous explicit efforts made to actually curb and deter citizens’ votes – the polar opposite of a good and properly functioning democracy. While we want to curtail voter fraud and ensure that those voting are actually citizens and don’t vote more than once, that can be accomplished without creating onerous restrictions on one’s right to vote (like cancelling people’s right to vote if they fail to vote in a prior election and fail to return a card saying that they still wish to be registered). In reality, these efforts are designed to prevent or discourage people from exercising their vote- the very hallmark of a democracy. The proponents of these rules are seeking to emasculate the will of the people because they perceive that the folks most affected will vote in a way that they don’t like. Again, this is anathema to democracy. There is no conceivable justification for severely limiting the number of functioning voting machines in minority areas and yet that is precisely what occurred in Georgia and various other places in the past midterm election.
What has become abundantly clear is that many of the folks who espouse the importance of “patriotism” care far less about the preservation of our democracy and our country, than they do about winning elections and maintaining power and control. I have no doubt that if Madison, Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers they purport to revere were present to witness this evolution of events, they would be outraged at how their designed system of government has been exploited and hijacked.
