Newspaper headlines and television pundits are screaming that Donald Trump’s election is a threat to “our democracy.” A strange charge following an election when a clear majority of voters chose the winner. Isn’t that consistent with the very definition of “democracy”?
That does not mean that another Trump turn as president is a good thing. Given what he has promised to do, his presidency is likely to subject our constitutional order to severe testing. The fact is, the United States is not a democracy. That word does not occur in any of our foundation documents. It is not in the Declaration of Independence, or in the Constitution, or in the pledge of allegiance (“to the flag of the United States of America and the republic for which it stands,”) or in the oath of office every federal official takes.
The United States is a republic which at present is controlled by an oligarchy. It is also becoming more authoritarian. The separation of powers among the three branches of government, essential to avoid autocracy, is deeply eroded, To cite two of many relevant examples:
Congress has given the president the permission to make war without a formal declaration, and to impose sanctions on foreign governments and citizens for behavior not relevant to U.S. security or well being.
The supreme court has proclaimed the president partially immune from prosecution for violation of laws he is sworn to uphold.
To point out that the United States is not legally or constitutionally a democracy is not just a quibble over dictionary definitions. The United States government—not the American people–has organized much of its foreign policy on the presumption that creation of “democracy” elsewhere is necessary for American security. Successive presidents, from Clinton to Bush, to Obama, to Biden, set the United States up as the sole judge of what is a democracy and what is not and reserved to the United States the right to use military force and economic sanctions to “defend democracy.” Since the end of the Cold War both Republican and Democratic presidents have embraced this fundamentally flawed assumption.
If democracy is, as Abraham Lincoln specified, “government of the people, for the people, by the people,” how can a foreign government create it for another country? Attempts to interfere in the politics of foreign countries will normally backfire because those “democratic forces” we try to support will be regarded as instruments of a foreign power.
In this 21st century the United States fought a war in Afghanistan for more than twenty years, causing the death of well over 100,00 people, then left the country with a more oppressive government than it had when the U.S. invaded. The United Sates attacked Iraq on specious grounds (that it had retained nuclear and biological weapons), removed its entire government on the assumption that all that is required for “democracy” is elections. Yes, elections were held, but nearly 5,000 Americans lost their life; thousands more suffered serious injury, hundreds of thousands Iraqis were killed and the Islamic fundamentalist ISIS suddenly rose to
occupy much of Iraq and Syria. Today Iraq is more friendly to Iran than to the United States.
Currently the United States is feeding—in fact enabling–two horribly destructive wars in the name of “defending democracy” when none of the belligerents we are defending meet the most fundamental requirements of democracy.
Ukraine is one of the least democratic countries in the world today. The current government resulted from a coup d’etat in 2014 that removed an elected president, received votes from only a portion of the territory claimed and has suspended scheduled elections. The Russian government had reason to suspect that the United States engineered the coup that brought the current government into power. How would the United States react to a more powerful foreign government forming an anti-American government in Mexico or Canada? Have we forgotten that President Woodrow Wilson took us into the first world war when he learned that Germany was trying to arrange a military alliance with Mexico?
The other site of extreme violence supported by the United States in the name of “supporting democracy” is in the Middle East. The U.S. is supplying the weapons for Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and to bomb large areas of Lebanon. Yet Israel illegally occupies the Palestinian territory on the West Bank of the Jordan river, has for decades kept the Palestinian residents of the Gaza strip locked in an outdoor prison. The Netanyahu government has violated key provisions of virtually every United Nations resolution that legitimized the creation of the Israeli state in the first place. The Israeli government has consistently followed policies the United States opposed, yet the Biden administration has been enabling crimes against humanity in the name of supporting “democracy.”
Should we aspire to democracy at home in the United States? Well, if the latest election was an exercise in democracy—and who can doubt that it was—I’ll take instead the republic of limited powers our founders created. That republic, whose basic principles have been violated by both our dominant political parties, is what is threatened in America today.
