The United States is Not a Democracy

We do not think of our Constitution as something that we can alter to improve its procedures, to meet our own needs, or to assert our rights.  Americans, alone in the world, declare our constitution to be sacred and unchangeable, with only a handful of amendments in 223 years.  When someone brings up democracy in the United States, somebody will pull out that tired cliché, “the Founders» established a republic, not a democracy.”  And they would be right – the United States has claimed the mantle of democracy without actually achieving it, but this is not the whole story.  The Founders did talk about founding a “republic,” even though they did not have any good idea what that meant, besides not being a democracy.  They wanted an oligarchy» ; they didn’t want YOU to govern yourself. These Founders, we have been repeatedly told, sat down in Philadelphia, in 1787, with august wisdom and omnipotent foresight, to draft the Constitution of the United States that would last forever.  But, in fact, this was not predetermined, and the eleven years that passed between the Revolution and writing of the Constitution was one in which our democratic forefathers and the aristocrats we call the Founders struggled for supremacy.

History is not about the past, but about the present.  People who talk about the United States being “a republic, not a democracy” may be correct, but they also want you to be disempowered.  Reclaiming our understanding of American political origins will allow us to reconceive the American political project today by understanding the path not taken.  And when we see why the path was not taken, we will see that it was not for any good reason, and in fact was for many bad reasons.  By understanding that the path we have followed was not the only one available to us, we can understand how we might achieve democracy in America today.

Oh those Founders.  I would wager that half of all contemporary political writing has some reference to The Founders.  The picture we have of the authoring of the United States Constitution is one of wise Founders crafting an enduring document.  We remember James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton for the Federalist Papers, a propaganda piece in favor of the Constitution that they had been so influential in drafting.  We don’t remember that these men were largely elitist, with pretensions to aristocracy and hostility to democracy.  They and other members of the Philadelphia Convention stepped in to stem the tide of the democratic forces that had been overtaking the American Revolution following the capitulation of the British Empire.  This sort of period in any revolution would come to be known as a “Thermidorian Reaction.”

A Thermidor, or Thermidorian Reaction, is the passage in a revolution from the dominance of popular democratic forces to the dominance of a new elite who seek to preserve the power they have gained from participating in the revolution.  The phrase derives from the violent reaction against the leaders of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins» .  The French revolutionaries adopted a new “metric” calendar, the last summer month being “Thermidor.”  Because the purge of the radical Jacobins occurred in that month, the period of reaction by conservative forces within any revolution is usually called a Thermidor, or a Thermidorian Reaction.  The reactionary forces are usually composed of those who have achieved political and economic power from the revolution, and don’t want to see the revolution carried further» .

We can also reconstruct the progress and regress of the American Revolution in this way.  Despite what is written in history textbooks, the elite usually follow upon the heels of the people at large.  It was the people of little property or reputation who truly drove the transformation of British America from colonies into more democratic states.  The great cities, like New York and Philadelphia, elected new governments parallel to the old.  Women from Boston to Philadelphia seized food stores during the low points of the Revolutionary War to impose a just price on the wealthy merchants who tried to make money from conditions of scarcity.  The people called their own constitutional conventions, without waiting for the great names of the revolution to summon them, and from the common ranks rose great democrats.  James Cannon and Thomas Young, for example, were militiamen who were at the center of drafting the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania, the most democratic constitution in English North America.  But by 1787, all the advances of democracy in the young nation will have been stamped out by the reaction of the wealthy and well-born.  The Constitution signaled the completion of the American Thermidor.

Massachusetts was the state in which the tides turned against the democratic wing of the Revolution.  Boston was the scene of the greatest radicalism, fostered in the citizen assemblies of its townships.  But when time came to write the new constitution for the state, the conservative forces stalled and the moderate center caved.  The township assemblies would merely advise on the content of the state constitution, rather than vote directly on its passage.  The conservative constitution included a powerful executive, bicameral legislature, and high property qualifications to be allowed to vote, and the majority of the Massachusetts towns despised it.  The elite-dominated convention passed it anyway.  This wealth-dominated constitution would result in instability several years on.  Massachusetts, as most of the rebel states, had sold bonds to raise money for the war effort.  By 1786, the wealthy bondholders were ready to cash in, and the state government raised taxes to pay for the repayment of the debt.  These taxes proved burdensome to poor western Massachusetts farmers, and one farmer, Daniel Shay, led a militia against this transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.  It was this “Shay’s Rebellion” that gave urgency to the establishment of a new Constitution for the whole United States.

Generally, history texts gloss over the period between the Revolutionary War, ending in 1781, and the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  Intellectuals who lionize the Founding Fathers (two hundred long years after massive change in the social and economic conditions in which the Founders lived) usually describe the United States Constitution as necessary because what existed before “didn’t work.”  In this, they are usually echoing the judgments of the Federalist Papers, and not without some truth.  But the fact of the matter is that history does not happen for good reasons, and the political arrangements that were destroyed or denied in the new Constitution had much to commend them.  Today, it is the existing government that “doesn’t work,” and, in fact, is almost entirely irrelevant to the operations of the government it is supposed to constitute.

If we are to save ourselves from the enormous problems today, we must do several things:

1. We must realize that the Constitution is dead. The end of the twentieth century saw the end of the Constitution, as its wording was squeezed for any meaning that could be made of it.  The Bush Administration shredded its parchment, burnt the scraps, and stuffed the ashes down the throats of tortured prisoners.
2. We must realize that nothing in our current government is working, and has little to do with anything in the Constitution.  The Democratic and Republican parties don’t have anything to offer anybody that isn’t a corporation.  The Tea Party definitely doesn’t have anything to offer.  Nothing is going to happen until we choose to see beyond the blinders placed upon us by the power-serving jabber of Fox News, the New York Times, or CNN.
3. We must recognize that to begin to correct these problems is to write a new founding document, with a declaration of rights appropriate to the whole host of needs and rights now denied to us – social, economic, cultural, and environmental.
4. We must organize across communities to draft such a foundational document.  A stepping stone to a new federal constitution would be the collective authoring of advanced democratic state constitutions.
5. To successfully organize to win our freedom, we must overcome the interpersonal barriers that we have as a result of our unequal society, connect with our compatriots, trust them without good reason to do so, and be willing to be there when the struggle is difficult.

As part of such an endeavor, I will be posting some of those features that our democratic forebears thought essential to a democratic republic in their day and how such features relate to the social conditions we find ourselves in.