Let us be clear, and keep it simple.

Most people, when they hear the word “democracy”, understand it to mean “governance by the people”.

In the USA, most people would probably go a bit further, and see democracy as a “one person, one vote” system of government – otherwise known as government through universal suffrage.

Of course, almost no countries are governed by direct democracy.  Most of us work for a living, and are too busy to formulate, debate, and vote on every single piece of legislation which will govern, regulate, and otherwise affect our everyday lives.

So we delegate or sub-contract this work to elected representatives.

Such a way of exercising democracy can be called a “parliamentary democracy”, a “presidential democracy”, a “republic”, or some other variation of these.

Some democracies place ultimate authority in their elected representatives, others place ultimate authority in a written “constitution” which their representatives are expected to respect.

Some democracies still split ultimate authority between a constitution and a monarch!

Contrary to some of the dubious arguments put forward by certain fringe groups in the USA, there is no deep, underlying conflict in how we choose to describe the US system of government.

If we want to be pedantic, the USA is in fact a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.

This simply means that:

1) The USA is a federation of semi-sovereign states.

2) These semi-sovereign states send elected representatives to a “congress”, or meeting place.

3) The existence of representatives is what makes the federated states a “republic” instead of a direct democracy.

4) These representatives agree to only pass legislation within the bounds of a written constitution, making the federated states a “constitutional republic” instead of a simple republic or direct democracy.

5) All voters in their own semi-sovereign states are allowed to vote for a “president”, i.e., someone expected to “preside” over each session of congress.  In the USA, this “president” is given specific powers, separate to the powers of Congress.

Hence, the USA is a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.

Just one particular form of democracy, in other words.  No need for pedantry or semantics.

*****

Whichever specific system is used, the end purpose is to vest power in “the people”.  Democracy.

People in the USA (especially politicians and propagandized voters) are fond of calling the USA “the world’s first and greatest democracy”.

This is not true.

The USA can claim to be the oldest <surviving> nation state with a democratic form of government, but such states have come and gone throughout history – from the Isle of Man, to Athens, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

But if we understand democracy as “rule by an elected government through universal suffrage”, then the USA has only been a nominal “democracy” since 1964 – when the Civil Rights Act of that year finally outlawed the unequal application of voter registration requirements, and gave the federal government power to enforce the constitutional right of all US citizens to vote.

Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788, it has been a slow crawl toward something approaching actual democracy in the USA.

While individual states were allowed to set their own voting requirements in the late 1700s, most chose only to enfranchise white men who owned property – about 6% of the population.

This property requirement had not been revoked by most states until another two or three generations had passed.

It is interesting to note that upon admission to the USA as a new state in 1792, Kentucky was among the earliest states to allow universal male suffrage with no property-holding requirements.  This right to vote included free men of color.  This is almost certainly due to the fact that many settler/colonizers had arrived on the Appalachian frontier from places like Virginia and North Carolina, where free people of color comprised around 20% of the population.

It would have been very hard to withhold the vote from people of color who were an integral part of the frontier settler community, and had helped to construct and man the blockhouses and forts in hostile Indian lands.

Once the indigenous peoples had been killed, subdued, assimilated, or removed, Kentucky reverted to the norm and disenfranchised the voting rights of free Black men and other men of color.

Men of color would not be universally entitled to vote until after the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed.  Many states, of course, introduced poll taxes, literacy laws, and other creative means of preventing men of color from exercising their voting rights.

New Zealand introduced truly universal suffrage in 1893.  To women.  To its indigenous Māori people.

The 19th Amendment would not give US women the right to vote until 1920.

Indigenous Americans were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1924.

Up until the 1940s and 1950s, Black Americans were often lynched – murdered outright – for attempting to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, various groups have worked hard to circumvent or undermine the law, in order to prevent universal suffrage from expressing the actual will of the people.

Re-districting (aka gerrymandering) is the most obvious and direct method employed.

The recent infiltration of state election boards by election result denialists is a new and dangerous plot twist…

But of far greater long term importance has been the erosion of a free and impartial press and media.  While Ronald Reagan‘s 1987 scrapping of the Fairness Doctrine governing broadcast media is often blamed for the rise of pseudo-news channels such as Fox, the truth is that the Fairness Doctine never applied to cable networks in the first place.

It was a bit as if he had scrapped regulation of vinyl and CD-based record companies just as Napster came online.

Where the end of the Fairness Doctrine probably DID have an impact, is that it allowed mainstream broadcasters to compete with cable “news” networks by dumbing-down to their level in many respects.

The rise of the internet – especially social media, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms – has caused an explosion of largely unregulated dis- and misinformation to become many voters’ “go-to” source for “knowledge”.

The golden age of US journalism and broadcast news is now ancient history.

Americans shop for news now, the way they have “shopped” for their religion since the so-called “Second Great Awakening” of the late 1700s and early 1800s introduced mass hysteria into religion.

Most Americans have never wanted anything approaching objective “Truth” or “Fairness” anyway.

Americans tend to choose whichever religion makes them feel good, or whichever religion condones whatever it is Americans want to believe or do.

Americans also tend to choose whichever political leader or party tells them what they want to hear, whether true or not.

Most of all, many Americans would throw away democracy itself for a cheaper tank of gasoline.

They would throw away democracy itself for a free pass to abuse all of the groups and people they hate.

“Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans is not a universal birthright belonging to every human being.

“Freedom” and “Liberty” are not things to be protected at all costs for EVERYONE.

No, “Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans simply means being allowed to do whatever they damn well please.

Amid all of the post-election soul-searching for the “whys?” and “wherefores?”, we should remember that for most of its history, the majority of Americans were struggling to participate in “democracy”, and a great many Americans were attempting to restrict access to “democracy”.

And it is precisely the ones attempting to restrict democracy who have always shouted the loudest about “protecting democracy”.

In modern times, we call this “gaslighting”.

In the USA, the gaslight is permanently on.

Must be due to the cheap cost of gas from deregulated fracking…

*****

The Enlightenment ideals which informed many of the Founding Fathers of the USA were almost immediately ignored and discarded in favor of the two major strands of ideology which have been at the heart of the American character for over 400 years.

From Plymouth and Jamestown, right to the present day, a huge number of Americans remain true to the goals of their two earliest colonies.

Religious extremism and rampant capitalism.

“You must believe what I believe”, and “Don’t get in the way of me making money”.

The “E pluribus unum” motto of the USA – “Out of many, one” – never really applied to its people.

But it certainly applies to the way Trump‘s America has managed to combine its worst founding ideologies into one.

God and Mammon, baby.