The deep crisis of U.S. democracy is not just the fault of one party, writes Nat Parry. The anxiety over the loss of democracy in the United States actually cuts across party lines.
Anti-Trump rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Feb. 8, during arguments on removing the Republican front-runner from the Colorado ballot. (Elvert Barnes, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Nat Parry
Special to Consortium News
Heading into the 2024 U.S. presidential election season, a Quinnipiac poll has found that “preserving democracy” is the top concern of American voters, coming in just ahead of immigration and the economy.
A total of 21 percent of respondents said that democracy is the country’s No. 1 issue, with climate change, health care, crime, racial inequality and international conflicts lagging far behind.
The focus on democracy appears — at first glance — to be good news for Joe Biden, with significantly more Democrats than Republicans citing it as their top issue (32 percent and 13 percent, respectively).
Correspondingly, the president has made “defending democracy” against the supposed threat posed by Donald Trump a central theme of his re-election campaign.
A Biden campaign strategy memo has identified Trump as “an existential threat to democracy,” and Biden, casting himself as the only bulwark protecting the nation from tyranny, has asserted that Trump “wants to be a dictator.”
Driving the point home, Biden went to Valley Forge, Pa., in early January to use the historic Revolutionary War site as a backdrop to rally supporters.
In a campaign speech intended to also mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, Biden called the defense of democracy “the most urgent question of our time,” and claimed that Trump is “willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”
“Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said.
The problem for Biden, however, is that anxiety over the loss of democracy in the United States cuts across party lines.
Just 38 percent of Americans express satisfaction with the level of democracy in their country, and although the Quinnipiac poll found that Democrats rank it as their top issue, there are strong indications that Republicans are just as — if not more – passionate about it than Democrats.
Democracy Gap
Donald Trump and Joe Biden, official portraits from Wikipedia. (Andrea Widburg, Flickr, Public Domain)
A 2022 survey found that 33 percent of liberals believe they can substantially influence American politics, but only 22 percent of conservatives feel the same way.
It was perhaps this feeling, combined with a profound lack of trust in the electoral system, that led Trump’s ardent supporters to attack the Capitol and temporarily halt Congress’s certification of the election results on Jan. 6, 2021.
While this “insurrection” confirmed in the minds of many Democrats that Trump would stop at nothing to maintain power, in the minds of many Republicans, this was a principled defense of the republic.
As Proud Boys member Marc Bru said upon receiving a six-year sentence for his role in the Jan. 6 protest, “You can give me 100 years and I’d do it all over again.”
Regardless of party identification, what is clear is that a vast majority of people across the political spectrum feel they have little to no control over what is seen as a largely unaccountable government.
On a wide range of issues, there is a palpable sense that the views of ordinary citizens are routinely ignored by the ruling elite.
These sentiments have been backed up by academic scholarship, with research by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University determining that public opinion has a negligible impact on public policy.
“Ordinary citizens have little or no independent influence at all,” Page says, noting that when 60-70 percent of Americans favor a particular policy change, that change has been implemented only about 40 percent of the time.
What influences policy, according to Gilens and Page, is not public opinion but private wealth.
In a 2017 book entitled Democracy in America?, they write that “through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power.” America’s historic levels of wealth inequality ensures that political power is held in relatively few hands, they point out.
While Gilens and Page examined decades worth of data from thousands of public opinion surveys and federal policy decisions to inform their conclusions, most average people seem to understand this democracy gap on a visceral level.
Many of them blame America’s out-of-control campaign finance system for sidelining the voices of average citizens, with some 85 percent of Americans believing that the cost of political campaigns prevents good people from running for office.
Polls have also consistently found that Americans — in theory at least — support more options on the ballot than those offered by the two-party system.
For the past several years, more than 60 percent of Americans have indicated that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.”
Despite this discontent, however, third parties and independents continue to struggle to gain traction.
In the same Quinnipiac poll that found that “preserving democracy” was the top issue facing the country, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent candidate Cornel West each received just 3 percent support, while independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received 15 percent.
Although these numbers may seem incongruent with the more than 60 percent who desire additional options, it should be noted that the campaign season is still early and that when it comes to RFK Jr., at least, his poll numbers could help him get into the televised presidential debates, which would substantially boost his profile.
The Commission on Presidential Debates has historically used 15 percent support as the threshold to allow independents and third party candidates into the debates, so – assuming they don’t change their rules – there is a good possibility that there will be more than two people on the stage this year.
Undemocratic Tendencies
Kennedy at a campaign rally in Phoenix in December 2023. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
But even with some early, promising indications of a more democratized election, other trends point in the opposite direction.
In a sign that the Democrats are growing concerned about Kennedy’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Feb. 9 claiming that the American Values 2024 PAC is improperly coordinating with the Kennedy campaign to help get him on state ballots.
As Politico reports, “the complaint is unlikely to go anywhere” since the hopelessly divided FEC almost always deadlocks on enforcement questions, “but it signals that national Democrats are dialing up their efforts to target Kennedy, the current leading non-major party presidential candidate, over fears that he may siphon votes away from President Joe Biden in this year’s election.”
Although it is nothing unusual for the two major parties to attempt to remove independents and third parties from ballots, what makes Election 2024 unique is that the likely Republican nominee is also being targeted for removal.
In a December 2023 Colorado Supreme Court decision disqualifying Trump from the ballot in the key battleground state, a majority held that
“the events of January 6 constituted a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish the peaceful transfer of power in this country.”
The court also determined that Trump “aid[ed] or further[ed] the insurrectionists’ common unlawful purpose of preventing the peaceful transfer of power,” namely by “exhort[ing] them to fight to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.”
Because of this, the court declared that Trump is ineligible to be president under Section 3 of the Constitution and should therefore not be listed on the ballot.
Still shaken by the events of Jan. 6, 2021, many Americans may consider drastic measures such as these warranted to shore up America’s democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the U.S. Supreme Court allows this decision to stand, but based on the justices’ questioning during the hearing on Feb. 8, court watchers seem to think that it will likely overturn the Colorado ruling.
Regardless of what happens at the Supreme Court, however, the trend is clear: using the courts and all other methods at their disposal, Democrats are willing to engage in unprecedented actions to ensure that the “sacred cause” of democracy is defended at nearly any cost.
Democracy Under Attack
Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, for one, doesn’t accept this line of reasoning. Rather than defending democracy from would-be tyrants, Gabbard believes that the elites are so terrified that Americans will make the “wrong” choice in Election 2024, they have decided to protect voters from themselves by “destroying our democracy and taking away our freedom.”
In a speech last week to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Gabbard declared that “our democracy is under attack,” and that those attacking it are doing so “in the name of saving our democracy.”
It is “the Democrat elite and the swamp creatures in Washington who are doing all that they possibly can to keep us the American people from a very simple thing – having the freedom to choose who we want to be our next president,” Gabbard warned.
“And it is clear through their actions they have no respect for us and they have no respect for our rights as citizens of this democratic republic,” she said.
What is also clear is that as Election 2024 heats up, the historic levels of distrust between America’s political factions will continue to grow.
With both sides perceiving each other as grave threats to the republic and neither fully articulating a clear understanding of how democracy is actually being eroded, the solutions that they advocate could very well have the effect of eroding it further.
Nat Parry is the author of the forthcoming book Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era. He is editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“Democracy” bit the dust the day corporations started ruling…America and the rest of the ‘democratic’ world.
A voter should be the one to determine which candidates her or his vote supports and opposes. In an N-candidate election for a single seat or office, voters who want to oppose fewer than N – 1 are told to lump it. They are denied the right to cast a vote that reflects their political judgment. But other voters, the ones who want to support exactly one candidate and oppose the rest, get to cast the vote that reflects their judgment. So the system denies the voters equality of influence, one voter to another. This creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma that gives people the false impression that they have an incentive to support a “lesser evil” that has money support or fame. The false impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The false impression commands mindshare via the effects of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). It is described over and over again as “realistic” and “math”. This can all be defeated by providing equality in the voting booth, one voter to another, which should be provided anyway because it is a right in a representative republic. Even for someone who doesn’t grasp how the PD distorts people’s mentalities and social interactions, the question should remain relevant, of what grounds there are to tell someone what vote to cast instead of leaving it to the voter. What grounds are there to accept some voters’ votes they way they want to cast them, but tell others, no, you can’t vote the way you feel or judge. You have to choose from options that don’t correspond to your political stance. This is not more moral than excluding some voters because of their color. It’s a different rule of discrimination, but it is still an immoral form of discrimination.
We have never had democracy. There was an uneasy truce among the more powerful gangs in the beginning, but, by the end of the 19th century, the ability of elites, through capitalism, to accumulate vast wealth began to end the ability of the masses to influence governance. Labor laws and social safety nets in the 1930s, 40s and 50s were the last vestiges of economic democracy. Since that era, we can change civil rights to the extent that any new law doesn’t affect the economic status quo for the top. Partisan Americans scream bloody murder at their major party counterparts about important and frivolous issues, masking the fact that the country is run by and/or for financial criminals gutting not only the US, but also most of the rest of the world, for short term profit.
Even if there were a path for democracy through electoral politics, we refuse to have a trustworthy electoral system. We use machines to vote on in many cases, and machines to count votes on in many cases. These machines run on proprietary software. We only have elections so that people can tell themselves that they live in a democratic state. The public relations department is the most important unofficial cabinet seat for those in power.
“The court also determined that Trump “aid[ed] or further[ed] the insurrectionists’ common unlawful purpose of preventing the peaceful transfer of power,” namely by “exhort[ing] them to fight to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.””
That the majority of a state supreme court could hold such an obviously politically minded and illiterate opinion of the First Amendment is astonishing. “Exhorting” people to “fight” for their rights and democracy is what EVERY political/social leader does ALL the time. And they usually tell people to do this at the target audience’s location, in this case the Capital. As unwise and cretinous and corrupt as he is, Trump did literally nothing wrong here in re to the idiocy and riot called an insurrection!
Democrats’ profession of passion for democracy is amazingly hypocritical, not only in light of all they do to assure Trump voters have no voice or candidate, but that they do the same with respect to Cornel West, Jill Stein, RFK, Jr., and that they have been doing this since at least the 2000 election. Safeguarding the electoral process is anathema to them, facilitating electoral fraud having become an article faith with ballot harvesting an art form the GOP is now considering emulating.
It is absurd that the Dem Party, a private organization that can’t bothered to hold even pro forma primaries and that plans to “anoint” the next president , calls itself the defender of democracy. Equally absurd, that anyone with two gray cells to rub together buys this nonsense (nice word).
It was a similar situation in 2016. Trump actually won the primaries he entered–to the consternation of the elites of both parties—while the Dems jiggered theirs around to sideline Sanders. The Dems and others then conspired to bring him down any way they could. Again, it is incredible that “the left” —supposedly smarter???—fell for this, fell for RussiaGate, joined in the Pink pussy hysteria, etc. I recognized the game being played as soon as I saw a post-election issue of Harper’s magazine with a graphic of Trump behind bars.
Now, the more the Dem Party attempts to shove the dangerous demented grifter-puppet Biden across the finish line while crying foul at Trump, the more obvious the rot is. Many Trump votes will be protest votes. Those who vote for biden will be “Never Trump” TDS victims. In the latter group are, weirdly, some of our most educated individuals in our voter base. They will happily send in their mail-in ballots with the X for Biden without any nasty questions’ rising in their NYT-reading minds.
Democrats have been, and continue to be, on the wrong side of American history.
Indian genocide: check
Other genocides around the world: check
Slavery (still Constitutionally allowed for prison inmates): check
Opposing women’s suffrage: check
Hiding the criminality of bloody-thirsty, baby-killing war criminals: check
Enabling CIA, FBI, and NSA malfeasance that has, and continues, to kill tens of millions of innocent people around the world, plus overthrowing democratically elected governments that represent their people’s interests instead of American corporate interests: check
The sheer gall of the neolib Ivy Dems’ “lesser of two evils” assertion. Could their contempt for us rank and file peasants be any clearer?! The unfriendly take-over (and leveraged buy-out) of the D party was underway by the late ’70s; it wasn’t simply because of some “adjustment” to the Reagan ’80s. I know because I fought them. They then dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor–thereby the majority (at least 60% and more realistically 75%) of Americans. What did the Ds do for Rust Belt workers? Nothing. What did they do to the Wall Street pigs who caused the ’08 crash? Nothing. Look at the donor lists…so whose interests count? Corporate obviously. But also the elite administrative and advisor Ivy league grads who serve the global financial system.
As the critics point out, a pile of money produces nothing. What is called the Real Economy, actual physical production of goods and services, has been pushed aside over the last three decades in favor of the that abstraction known as money and the machinations of finance. Never forget under whose watch NAFTA and deregulation happened. Or the D elite support for the WTO. I’m proud to have taken part in the 1999 anti-WTO “Battle of Seattle” that deeply shook the European neolibs. But apparently the Dem elite still thinks an econ system that only works for the few is just fine.
What has puzzled me is why this administration would ally with PNAC empire supporting, Dick Chaney trained neocons, such as those running Biden’s Dept. of State. I suspect it’s related to the finance fiends (now there’s evil!) who are afraid of what’s coming. Manipulating other people’s money and trickle-up will not last much longer. Which only leaves a return to grand empire like before 1914, a period looked at wistfully by the Austrian econ school that dreamed up the WTO.
Democracy is about a lot more than voting. It is about advantage coming only from our innate talents and what we do with them – not from influence, identity, or wealth (including the recently ennobled “intergenerational wealth” – what colonists wanted to restrict, at least in theory). Voting in the US is class war theater, meant to keep us status quo. It has been neutered.
Wake up Americans, you have NO SAY in the General election for President, unless the state you reside in has asked you to be one of it’s electors. PRESSURE the GOVERNOR & STATE REPRESENTATIVES to both run as independent from the worthless duopoly next cycle & ONLY SELECT ELECTORS NOT ASSOCIATED with said duopoly. ANY PREVIOUS elector must be disqualified for selection. A curated list of example selections should be provided.
Look up “Liquid Democracy”.
If you ENCYST on a representative gov’t, at least bring in Frohnmayer Balance for deciding on a “representative” or an executive. equal.vote
Your choices in a US “Democracy”
Candidate A: War with Russia and a $100 billion to Ukraine.
Candidate B: Genocide against the Palestinians and a $100 billion to Israel.
Know Your Rights
This is a public service announcement… with guitar!
Know your rights
All three of ’em
Number one
You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a crime
Unless it was done
By a Policeman
Or an aristocrat
Oh, know your rights
Candidate Obama: Pivot to the Pacific and $100 billion to Taiwan.
“Democrats are willing to engage in unprecedented actions to ensure that the “sacred cause” of democracy is defended at nearly any cost.”
Irony, right? Because they control the Administration, Dems are the chief attackers on democracy at this point (what little there really is, vis. Gilens and Page.) They are responsible for the wave of censorship, primarily in social media; they are attacking both 3rd party and Republican ballot access; and they are barraging Trump, their chief opponent in the oncoming election, with trumped-up criminal charges. That last is especially egregious; I don’t believe it’s happened before – it’s associated with the most flagrant 3rs-world dictatorships.
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That said, I don’t think Republicans would do any better. The best evidence is Trump’s refusal to accept the results of an election. He failed to convince even one judge that the results were rigged. lBut at the moment, the Republicans’ ox is gored, so they’re the ones screaming.
Democracy? What democracy?
” He failed to convince even one judge that the results were rigged. But at the moment, the Republicans’ ox is gored, so they’re the ones screaming.
Democracy? What democracy?”
I believe that is incorrect.
The plaintiffs were refused “standing.”
The actual evidence for ballot chicanery was never examined in a court of law.
Love that Remove Trump “rally”! Three people?
And apparently it is required that Maine’s secretaries of state be balding. Lack of activity under the hair follicles?
When was the last time it mattered whtehr Team D or Team R controlled Congress or the White House? No matter which, all we get is more warfare, more poverty, more homeless, more privileges for the richest 1% of the population. The practice of governance by either team is deeply authoritarian. It is not better than China or Russia, despite all the Cold War, kill the ch*nks, kill the r*sskies rhetoric.
And they still think they live in a democracy!
1. There is little actual representation of the electorates by the elected.
2. There is virtually no transparency of the actual processes of government.
3. There is virtually no accountability for bad decisions, and poor outcomes.
Without these three one can not have a healthy democracy
Odds of a real election in November must be slim, though this is not a struggle we can abandon with impunity.
The large contingent blocking elections is the neoconservative-neoliberal faction. This is now the core of both major official parties. Trump is not altogether aligned with these, but is otherwise just looking to batten on disorder.
The neoliberal neocons are now more closely running the Democratic Party, which was historically a greater threat to them. The current party has moved to block primary challenges and to block other candidates from the polls.
In the last cycle, they “predicted” that the election would be challenged, yet the Republican “challenge,” insofar as it came, was notably half-hearted and ill prepared. Up until election day, Republican complaints targeted the mail-in votes and made the usual attempts to target disenfranchised voters. After election day, Giuliani was left sputtering nonsense about vote-counting machines “belonging to Hugo Chavez,” and the mail-in issue was curiously (and thankfully) dropped. The 1/6 “event” was staged, as is now pretty well documented.
It is clear enough that the CIA would not need to go to Chavez for the software to alter votes, and we also know that something of the sort was used in a Democratic primary that year, by a supposedly “mistaken algorithm.” But now this same party has advertised that they fear “deep fake” videos linking them to crimes to influence the election. Is this just a general salvo, or what might be planned?
Things are lining up for a major grab of power. This might be the year we see the gloves come off.
These comments are spot on .
Thank you all. I don’t feel so outnumbered now
As Gilens and Page showed in their 20 year study, there is no democracy in an oligarchic system. The two are antithetical. Since both major parties are controlled by the oligarchy, they have no incentive or ability to restore democracy. Only by running candidates who refuse the corrupting influence of large corporate funding, can we begin to take back what belongs to the people; our government. Those who have captured our government won’t let go without a fight. We have a huge struggle ahead of us. Don’t count on the Ds or Rs to help us. They seem hopelessly convinced that their brand of Kool-Aide is the answer.
The single most insidious form of propaganda for the past couple centuries is the Orwellian fiction that elections have anything to do with democracy in the first place. Aristotle writes very clearly in his Politics series that the ancient democrats considered elections to be an institution of oligarchy because they only ever select from a well-off stratum of society to rule over others. That’s why democrats chose their public officials through a random lottery system known as sortition, not elections. You don’t need to look any further than that Gilens and Paige study from 2014 to see that our government functions objectively, empirically as an oligarchy where the affluent elites and their interest groups determine public policy but average citizens have a miniscule, statistically indistinguishable-from-zero impact. But this isn’t merely a function of this or that billionaire funneling money to one politician or another, this is simply how elections function irregardless. This is how democracy was understand by others for millennia after the Greek Classical period as well. It’s only in the liberal revolutions that overthrew feudalism and replaced them with the modern republics, modeled after the oligarchic government in Rome, that this original definition of democracy was distorted and inverted to mean its historic opposite.
Far from having lost democracy, we never had it to begin with.
Fantastic comment … I have been an advocate of sortition as the means to produce the people’s representatives (locally and in the fed gov) for a long time.
But we’re and exceptional democracy, doncha know, or so most have been taught to believe …
We don’t just FEEL that we have no control over the government of the empire. We KNOW WE DON’T! Anyone who still believes that the U.S. is a democracy is a fool.
3rd parties struggle against the numerous and onerous roadblocks to gain traction, roadblocks supported by the Business Party with its Democratic and Republican flanks. These roadblocks are anathema to a true democracy. Squeezing a rainbow of needs into two streams. Hardly representative of the people.
It’s refreshing to see other people see through the corp / billionaire medias phony scripted narratives exclaiming their concern for “preserving democracy” when the attacks started years ago , without Trump
It should be noted that the fantastic Michael Parenti book “Democracy for the Few” preceded the Page & Gilens work by a few decades. Parenti spelled it all out long ago.
The Dem Party sold out working people back during the Clinton years and never recovered. Now all it has is gonadal ID politics culture war b.s. to peddle to certain factions; it’s also been more or less in favor of unpopular unfettered illegal immigration.
And it’s been a warmongering party for several decades.
The GOP was of course also captured by the war-profiteers but it was also dominated by the local Chambers of Commerce. The guys who want to cut Social Security and Medicare, get rid of the minimum wage and destroy labor unions.
A populist backlash was bound to happen (even in rough form with Trumpenstein) with these two bozos running the country.
If Joe Biden had wanted to strengthen democracy, the one place where he had power to act was within the Democratic Party. Traditionally, a President is the party leader and puts their people into power in the party apparatus.
2024 reveals that Democracy is dead in the Democratic Party.
— after the special prosecutor gave Biden his Get Out of Jail Free Card about how a jury would never convict a forgetful old man, there were a series of strange stories in the corporate media about how it was really too late for the Democrats to change horses, even if this one is falling down mid-stream. The concept is quite unbelievable, if there were any ‘democracy’ within the Democratic Party. Only the few delegates from the Privlidged States had been chosen. Not even Super-Duper Tuesday had occurred, it was very early in the process of picking a nominee, and yet the message out from the Democrats and their noise machine was that it was too late. IIRC, we have not yet reached even the 56th anniversary of LBJ’s announcement.
— The Democrats are now clearly moving, in unison, towards a voter-free convention picking the nominee. The goal at this point is to build enough of a solid block of right-wing, corporate Biden Democrats along with the still present Super-Duper-Delegates who are elected by no voter … and thus the convention will chose the next nominee.
— The supposed opposition within the Progressive wing is putting up zero opposition to this. They do not have a dog in the fight. There are no ‘progressive’ delegates being elected to the convention, where the decision will be made. While the Corporate Democrats are imploding and falling apart, the Progressive wing of the party is being very, very careful NOT to take advantage of the situation.
Democracy is Dead within the Democratic Party. This is the one place where if Joe Biden had wanted to strengthen democracy, he could have done so with the power of the party leader. Instead, it appears that if democracy had still been even breathing within the Democratic Party, Genocide Joe has made sure it is now truly dead.
The Democratic Party — this is not what democracy looks like.
Don’t kid yourselves – Democracy has been dead and buried for a very long time now – if it ever really existed except in myth…
Right on!!!