Democracy is a Spectrum: A History of the USA
Democracy isn’t something you either have or you don’t, nor is it the right to vote, nor freedom of speech. Democracy is when the everyday people have an actual say in the governing of the country, regardless of what means this power is exercised with.
A nation with elections can still be undemocratic, as seen with Russia, Venezuela, and others, and a nation without elections could be democratic, provided the populace had influence over the government through other means such as well-attended town hall meetings and organized labor unions. Political power is held and exercised through all sorts of organizations and institutions, not just voting. Different organizations and institutions will play more or less of a role in different countries, so there’s not one formula for what is vs. isn’t “a democracy”.
Instead of thinking about democracy as a noun (“is X country a democracy?”), it’s more useful to treat it as an adjective (“how democratic is X country?”). There’s a wide range, or spectrum, of how much control the masses (as opposed to some group of elites) can have of political decisions.
Reducing “democracy” to a binary choice means taking that spectrum and drawing a line with authoritarianism on one side and democracy on the other. A country could spend 50 years becoming less democratic, but if they still fall on the “democracy” side of a conveniently-placed dividing line, the binary view of democracy hides that fact. This is what has happened to the US over the past 50 years, and is why it’s important to understand that democracy is a spectrum and not binary. Instead of asking if the US is “a democracy”, ask yourself how democratic is the US. The answer to the second is much more nuanced and useful than the first.
The main theme of this blog recently has been that history is the most important tool one has for understanding the present. The rest of this post will be a brief history of how democratic the US has been over the years, and some of the driving forces behind the shifts.
Early US History
To start, the Founding Fathers hated democracy, using the word in a derogatory way similar to how socialism is used today. Even a century before independence, the colonies were founded as explicitly anti-democratic. Here’s an excerpt from The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (emphasis mine):
..the government of this province may be made most agreeable to the monarchy under which we live and of which this province is a part; and that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy, we, the lords and proprietors of the province aforesaid, have agreed to this following form of government
Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers, said "democracy is the devil's own government.” After independence, the Federalist Papers were written and circulated to make the case in favor of the US Constitution. James Madison’s famous Federalist No. 10 made a similar case:
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths
The US government was thus set up in a way that intentionally thwarted the public’s ability to influence it. In other words, the original US government was intentionally undemocratic.
The Founders drew inspiration from a contemporary of theirs in Britain named Edmund Burke. He was a political philosopher who was also anti-democracy, so while Britain and France were in the process of becoming more democratic, he took the view that the power should remain in the aristocrats’ hands. His vision was that of a republic, with elected representatives, who were easily corrupted by the aristocracy, if not already part of the nobility themselves.
It was hard to blame Burke; one of the main examples of “democracy” in his lifetime was the violent French Revolution (we’ve since come up with better ways of expressing democracy, of course). Still, his political system was designed to make the masses feel like they had more power, without actually giving them meaningful power. In other words, he wanted to make people think their country was becoming more democratic, when it really wasn’t. Sounds a lot like the “deep state” conservatives like to scapegoat today, which is interesting, since innovating this concept earned Burke the nickname “father of modern conservatism”. From the start, having the “deep state” control things has been the main goal of conservatism.
The Founding Fathers used several methods to suppress democracy in the government they created, often drawing from Edmund Burke’s recommendations. Only land-owning white men were allowed to vote, and even then, they couldn’t vote directly for most of the federal government. Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures, so even the land-owning white men could only vote for those voting for the senators. The Electoral College system had a similar effect, where each state would vote on electors who would then assemble and vote on the president. Generally, these electors have voted in the same way their state’s voters elected them to, but the Constitution gave them no obligation to do so, allowing them to override the populace. There have been many cases of this being done, called “faithless electors”, all throughout US history.
Judicial appointments are made by the president and approved by the Senate, both of which were initially two levels removed from the voters, making the judiciary branch three levels removed from the voters, which was already an elitist group. The levels of separation made the system even more elitist, as a wealthy/powerful person could much more easily influence the relatively few state legislators to elect a senator they liked, than to do the same for all the voters. This was by design, not a mistake, as the Founding Fathers came from British nobility and wanted to keep themselves in power rather than diffusing power throughout society. Clearly, this system is not democratic, and that was the Founding Fathers’ goal. The US did not start out democratic at all, and instead had to become increasingly democratic over time.
Universal White Male Suffrage
The first major move towards becoming more democratic was extending suffrage from land-owning white men to all white men. This was achieved on a state-by-state basis over many decades. In this time, new states were admitted with universal white male suffrage from the start, like Vermont in 1791 and Kentucky in 1792, and existing states had their laws changed to remove the requirement of owning property. As we’ll see repeatedly, agitation in favor of change was key to this expansion of suffrage. For example, the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island was mobilized in 1841 to fight for broader suffrage.
The extension of suffrage was a large tenet of Jacksonian democracy, named after Andrew Jackson, a populist who appealed more to everyday voters than previous presidents. He, and especially his VP Martin Van Buren, were also early innovators of political machines, though, which managed to reduce politics in many US cities to effective local dictatorships. This was done by offering jobs or other perks to people who would agree to vote for your party. Working people in more unstable situations would be more willing to sell a vote for a stable job than a wealthy land-owner would. Universal male suffrage made the US more democratic, but also opened the door for political machines to gain power, which made things less democratic in certain places, namely cities. This is a good early example of how the level of democracy in a society is determined not just by some simple rules, like who can vote, but also by how the society itself is organized.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Extending suffrage to all men, regardless of race, took more violence than the previous step, most obviously the Civil War, but that was only part of it. Bleeding Kansas started in 1854, two years before North Carolina became the last state to grant suffrage to all white men. This violent era lasted for several years, with pro- and anti-slavery people moving to the newly-formed Kansas in order to influence its vote on whether the state would be admitted as a slave state or free state. This period saw dozens of deaths, and was a prelude to the Civil War. Following the Civil War, KKK lynchings and race massacres helped keep black people down.
Politically, their defeat in the Civil War forced the south to free slaves, and three Constitutional Amendments (#13-15) legally granted everyone equal rights regardless of race, including voting rights. Reconstruction required direct intervention by the federal government to force the south to comply with the new Amendments, as the conservative southerners still didn’t want to grant black people rights even after they lost the war. Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat, became president because Lincoln chose him as VP for a unity ticket, then Lincoln got killed. He sabotaged Reconstruction, but the efforts were resumed by the following president, Ulysses S Grant. After his 8 years, though, there was less political motivation for the north to keep intervening in the south on black peoples’ behalf. A compromise decided the highly-contested 1876 election, giving Republican Rutherford B Hayes the presidency if he agreed to end Reconstruction.
The result was Jim Crow got worse, including laws that would find ways to prevent black people from voting without explicitly discriminating against black people. For example, slaves were basically never allowed to learn to read, and that reality wasn’t magically changed when they were freed. Laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests could be applied to everyone and thus not explicitly discriminate based on race, but target black people since they had lower literacy rates. Because a good number of white people were also illiterate, they made this targeting more egregious by allowing someone to vote if their grandfather could (“grandfathered in”).
Taking a binary look at democracy, one might say that black people legally had the right to vote, and just had to follow the same rules as anyone else. The actual reality was that black people had very little influence on the government and thus had almost no meaningful democratic representation, even after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Women’s Suffrage
The next group of people to gain suffrage was women. This too was violently resisted, as in 1917, when 33 suffragists were sent to Occoquan Workhouse (prison) for protesting and were beaten and tortured. Women’s suffrage was most nonviolent of the major suffrage movements, instead using political disruption.
One of the 33 “Silent Sentinels” beaten at Occoquan was Alice Paul, a famous suffragist. She had spent 2 years in Britain, where the suffragette movement was more violent. She returned in 1910, and two years later a bombing and arson campaign was started by some of her connections in the UK, like Emmeline Pankhurst. Stateside, Paul and others were non-violent, but had began to use disruptive protests, like extended picketing outside the White House in opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s inaction on women’s suffrage. This was what the Silent Sentinels did, which was the first time any protest movement had picketed the White House. Hundreds were arrested and 168 served jail time over two and a half years of protests. It ended when the Nineteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate, granting universal women’s suffrage in the US.
The women’s suffrage movement should be celebrated for its effective non-violence, but we also shouldn’t assume other movements could have done the same. Women’s suffrage had a few things going for it that allowed it to succeed without violence. First is that women are half the population. Most white men (i.e. the ones deciding who could vote) lived in families without any minorities, but basically all of their families included women. People are more sympathetic to those they interact with regularly. Men also depended on women to have and raise kids, not to mention the process of making them, things women are uniquely qualified for. Slaves and other oppressed black laborers mostly represented a cheaper option for labor, not something only black people could do. Women are the only ones who can possibly fulfill certain roles. Adding to this, the end of the fight for women’s suffrage came shortly after the end of WWI, which had made the dependence on women even more clear. While men were fighting the war, women had to do much of the work domestically, including things like manufacturing that are often associated with male labor.
The next advantage suffragists had was that some newly-admitted states in the western USA had granted women suffrage from the start. The first was Wyoming in 1869, 50 years before the 19th Amendment. This was done by Democrats who believed it would draw more women to Wyoming, who would then vote for the party that gave them suffrage. By the end of the century, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado had also been founded with women’s suffrage allowed. By the time the 19th Amendment was passed, most of the states west of the Mississippi River, as well as Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts, had women’s suffrage. Suffrage starting at the state level gave women political influence at the federal level, where the Amendment was passed.
The final thing the suffragists had going for them was the threat of violence. Alice Paul was a known associate of one of the organizers of the UK’s suffragette terrorist campaign. While she had till then remained non-violent, she had helped organized 2000 Silent Sentinels to picket the White House for 2.5 years, and they could surely make bombs too. The political pressure they applied, helped by women’s suffrage already existing in certain states, combined with a possibility that they would escalate, made passing the 19th Amendment the politically advantageous move.
Achieving greater equality has always been a hard-fought battle throughout history. Elites have never granted more freedoms to those they have power over simply because they asked nicely. Freedoms are not given, they’re taken, and taking them requires at the very least disruption and the threat of violence, because elites will use violence to resist change. No matter how much of a pacifist you are, no matter how much you want to truly believe “violence is never the answer”, the sad reality from history is that violence is almost always required to make society more democratic and free.
The Gilded Age
While the right to vote was extended to more people over the Gilded Age that followed the Civil War, it’s not clear the US actually became a more democratic country. Economically, this period was when the Industrial Revolution took off in the US, expanding the economic possibilities. The people who were lucky and skilled enough to build large companies, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, would become some of the richest and most powerful people ever. They were brutal to their workers and the populace as a whole, earning them the epithet “robber barons”.
As this was happening, the government simply wasn’t prepared to regulate such a system. There was no need to build a large bureaucracy full of experts in specialized fields when most of the economy was agriculture and small shops. As the robber barons’ empires grew throughout the Gilded Age, they would use their economic power to influence politics, keeping government power weak as industry’s power expanded. The economic power the robber barons had was less democratic than the government. Sure, black men and women would eventually be given political voting rights, but no one was allowed to vote for who ran their company.
This is why the US arguably got less democratic during the Gilded Age. Reconstruction made the US more democratic by extending suffrage as well as increasing economic freedom, though certainly not entirely. The Gilded Age that followed was an era when Jim Crow politically and economically disenfranchised black people, and the economic power of the robber barons allowed them to force workers to work long hours for low pay in unsafe working conditions. These conditions would never be allowed if the working people had an equal say in how the system works, meaning they’re undemocratic, no matter who’s technically allowed to vote.
The Progressive Era and Roaring 20s
The Progressive era followed the Gilded Age, and saw T. Roosevelt and Taft grow government power and shrink industrial power by trust busting, then Wilson introduce an income tax, and the aforementioned 19th Amendment. This era saw the US become more democratic, but it would probably be a stretch to call it “a democracy” by modern standards.
During WWI, the Espionage Act was passed, which made it illegal to say anything that opposed the US government. The police encouraged and worked with vigilante groups who would round up anyone thought to be a threat to the country (meaning anyone not 100% in support of US involvement in WWI). In short, there was no freedom of speech, which is one of the most important democratic institutions. The book American Midnight by Adam Hochschild covers this era in depth.
Wilson also segregated the federal bureaucracy, which was previously one of the most equal fields in the country for black people, and their only real opportunity to be involved in the government. He refused to appoint any black people to his administration, preferring white supremacists. He held a screening of The Birth of a Nation, a pro-KKK, anti-black movie released during his presidency. This was all unsurprising, as Wilson was the only president who lived under the Confederacy, and his parents were Confederate supporters.
Having such a president in the White House gave cover to white supremacists by ensuring the federal government would look the other way as they killed and intimidated black people. Wilson’s term saw a high number of “race riots” (a less white-washed term would be “pogroms”), in which white people killed black people and destroyed their neighborhoods. The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 is the most remembered, but there were many more.
The summer of 1919 became known as the Red Summer. WWI had ended in 1918, so economic de-mobilization after the war and an increased labor supply from returning soldiers led to economic turmoil. As mentioned in this previous post, turning white workers against black has long been a tool used by the powerful in the US. Following WWI, Wilson said "the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism [communism] to America." It’s no surprise he was slow to call the national guard during the massacres that defined the Red Summer, like the Chicago riot, where 38 people were killed, the Elaine massacre, where hundreds were killed, and the Washington, DC riot, where at least 15 were killed, among many others. These distracted workers from organizing to fight for better working conditions.
By the time of the Wilson administration, monuments honoring Confederates were being built at over 3 times what they ever had been pre-1900. Another spike in Confederate monument construction would follow during the Civil Rights Era. Most Confederate monuments were put up long after the Civil War, during the two key eras of the 20th century when black people began to get more organized and represented. They were not put up to commemorate history, they were put up to intimidate black people as they fought for more democratic representation.
Once again, we see advances in democracy paired with attempts to thwart democracy, often violently. This is no surprise, because just like the Founding Fathers, elites at all moments don’t want their society to be democratic. Injustices within social systems exist for a reason. Anything undemocratic has someone who benefits, and they won’t give up that advantage happily. Instead, they’ll fight back and find new ways to keep and consolidate their power. It’s only when the populace organizes in effective opposition that they can make gains in freedom and equality. When those gains are made, they often get attributed to the politicians who implemented them, but almost invariably, those politicians only passed them when it became politically advantageous. Those who organize and disrupt outside of electoral politics are the ones that apply the pressure that pushes politicians to compromise. Those people deserve just as much, if not more, thanks for the democratization of the US as the Founding Fathers, politicians, or capitalists.
This was seen in the Progressive era, when much of the Coal Wars took place. This was a series of battles between coal miners and their companies, who notoriously treated them horribly. The Pullman Strike of railroad workers also occurred at the beginning of the Progressive era, starting in Chicago and spreading nationwide, with about 70 workers killed in the process. These sorts of violent disruptions of capitalists’ profits were effective at bringing them to the negotiation table, which is what allowed the government to make progressive changes.
While the Progressive era had increased government power and reduced capitalists’ power – a net positive for democracy – capitalists still had immense power. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t like J.P. Morgan, but while president in 1907 he had to let Morgan monopolistically buy up companies during a stock market crash, to prevent a total economic collapse. It was the second time Morgan had bailed out the US government.
In the Roaring twenties, three straight Republican presidents were elected – Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover – and loosened some of the Progressive era restraints on business. This pushed the US back in the undemocratic direction, and most Americans were worse off, with only the wealthy people enjoying the culture the US collectively remembers. For a while, things looked pretty good for the upper class, though, as consumer goods industries began to take off. However, the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism grew as a bubble until they crashed down into the Great Depression.
The New Deal
The Great Depression was followed by the election of FDR, whose New Deal was by far the biggest democratization of the economy in US history. The story is the same as before, with the Great Depression causing high levels of discontent, and a period of labor unrest resulting. Before the New Deal, there wasn’t an American middle class like there is today, and the workers were treated much worse. Notably, labor unions weren’t legally allowed until 1935. Without unions to fight the power of corporations, workers had little ability to negotiate higher wages or better working conditions. The legalization of unions came after 1934 was a particularly bad year for violent labor disputes, which included the 2-month West Coast waterfront strike, where 9 workers were killed, the Minneapolis general strike, where 4 people were killed, and the United States textile workers strike, where at least 19 people were killed. These types of disputes happened during the entire 1930s that was defined by the Great Depression.
In an effect similar to the UK suffragettes demonstrating the movement could turn violent, the revolution in the USSR 14 years prior to FDR’s presidency provided proof that a socialist uprising was possible. Many of the labor disputes of the Great Depression were organized by socialists and communists, who were liable to completely overthrow the system if they weren’t given a new, better, deal by the current system. This is why the New Deal was implemented: to save capitalism. The origin of the US middle class is socialists protesting the capitalist system, and the capitalist system thus begrudgingly granting more economic freedom.
Economic power is more powerful than political power, and that’s why politics is the realm that elites will allow more democracy within. Economics is how the nation actually operates, politics is just the rules they’re supposed to follow. In practice, enough economic power can allow people to skirt most of the political rules anyway. The New Deal economically democratizing the US had a bigger influence on the overall level of democracy than voting rights alone ever achieved. The New Deal both restricted how powerful economic elites could get, and forced them to treat their workers better. This has a much larger impact on the everyday person’s day-to-day life than their ability to vote alone ever could. This is real democracy, or at least something in the direction of it.
Once again, while the New Deal increased democracy overall, this era saw a strong anti-democratic backlash, like with the Japanese people put in internment camps during WWII. Additionally, there was an attempted coup, known as the Business Plot. It was financed by wealthy capitalists upset about the New Deal making them pay more in wages and taxes, and aimed to make FDR a ceremonial figurehead, with Smedley Butler, a veteran popular with other veterans, the real leader. The goal was to ally with Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and was ultimately thwarted by Butler himself. He was once a prolific imperial military officer, but later in life pivoted to outspoken anti-war socialist, and thus hated fascism. He played along with the plan so they wouldn’t find a more loyal person to lead the tens of thousands of veterans Butler had already led the year before in a fight on Capitol Hill over WWI veterans’ bonuses (the “Bonus Army”). When it came time to violently take over and install a fascist US government, Butler refused to follow through.
One of the alleged backers of the Business Plot was a Wall Street banker named Prescott Bush. However, some have said his involvement was overblown, like journalist Johnathan Katz, who said “Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so homegrown as the business plot.” Not that helping to finance the Nazis was any better, of course. The son and grandson (both named George) of this Nazi backer would each become president decades later, and contribute to the ongoing slide towards authoritarianism.
The Civil Rights Era
Even after the New Deal, economic elites still existed, and they wanted to undo the gains workers had made through the New Deal. The New Deal coalition lasted until the 60s, though, and played a key role in further democratizing the US over that time. The Democratic dominance of the federal government following the New Deal eventually resulted in a fairly progressive Supreme Court. Eisenhower, a Republican, was actually the one who completed this process by appointing Earl Warren Chief Justice. The Warren Court would pass down Brown v. Board of Education, ending school segregation, and Loving v. Virginia, preventing states from outlawing interracial marriage, among others that advanced civil rights in the US, making it more democratic.
Through the 50s and 60s, the Civil Rights Movement gained steam, aiming to end Jim Crow and give black people meaningful political rights. To that end, in 1965, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act (CRA/VRA) were passed by Lyndon Johnson, who would be the last of the New Deal era. Those two bills gave black people further democratic representation. LBJ would also pass the Great Society program, which significantly lowered poverty in the US, making LBJ one of the most democracy-advancing presidents in history. Still, he drafted kids to die in Vietnam, and was a known racist. As before, these improvements weren’t made out of the goodness of Johnson’s heart, but because they were politically advantageous.
While JFK was running for president in 1960, the Democrats as a national party were in an awkward spot. FDR and the New Deal had pulled most black people to the Democrats, but in the south, the “Dixiecrats” were the torch bearers of the Confederate legacy, primarily responsible for upholding Jim Crow. By 1960, black people had become organized enough to apply political pressure to end Jim Crow, which the southern Democrats wouldn’t support. Kennedy had to pick a side.
The decision took a while, as JFK tried to broadly appeal to both sides. Early on, he was the underdog. His opponent was Richard Nixon, the VP of the popular incumbent Eisenhower. Kennedy was Catholic, and it’s no coincidence there had never been a Catholic president before him. At the time, being Catholic made him unpopular with many people by default. The KKK was not only anti-black but also anti-Catholic. To win, he would have to make the right political decision about siding with civil rights or southern whites, regardless of whether it was the right moral choice. The choice was much bigger than Kennedy, and would reshape the Democrats’ identity, which would in turn reshape the Republicans’, and define US politics ever since. Two weeks before the election, JFK still hadn’t made a decision.
Then MLK was imprisoned in Georgia for organizing the Atlanta sit-ins. Bobby Kennedy was running his brother’s campaign, and decided that JFK’s likeliest path to victory was courting the black vote, and now was the time to act. He called in some favors from Kennedy family connections to get MLK released. This worked, and JFK won the black vote and election. The decision was foremost a political one, not an earnest belief in fighting for black people’s rights. As Attorney General for his brother, RFK would then have the FBI wiretap King, showing how much of a friend he really was. This political calculation and more is explained in Larry Tye’s biography on RFK.
The black voters JFK/LBJ relied on to win their elections had become well-organized, and applied pressure on them to pass meaningful legislation. Kennedy first proposed the civil rights bills, but was assassinated before passing them. Some believe he wouldn’t have even been able to convince congress to pass them. When he was killed, Johnson took over and stayed true to Kennedy’s vision. Johnson was notoriously one of the most skilled navigators of congress, and passed the bills Kennedy put forward, no easy task with the southern caucus of his party opposed.
Outside of the halls of power, there were more and more protests and boycotts throughout the 50s and 60s, causing disruption and more of a political imperative to come to an agreement. We celebrate MLK the most for his non-violent ways, but the likes of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X provided a threat of violence, which is historically necessary. Even MLK was not even seen as nonviolent by many at the time:
This post has talked repeatedly about the role violence has played in making the US more democratic, but even more important is how organized the populace is. It’s not surprising the main protests that brought economic change in the early 20th century originated in cities and coal towns. Workers in these locations were in much closer quarters than rural workers, so they had an easier time organizing. A cynic might say organizing is only so important because a well-organized group can threaten more force than people who aren’t organized, but being organized is key to avoiding violence as well. Organizations like the Rotary club, chambers of commerce, or MLK’s Poor People's Campaign can be used to organize votes to apply political pressure, and labor unions can organize people’s labor (strikes) to apply economic pressure.
Ultimately, though, violence will be used against any movement trying to extend democratic representation, so a counter-violence force is necessary. The likes of the Black Panther Party fulfilled this role. One of the Black Panthers’ main priorities was policing the police, following them around town with weapons to stop them from abusing black people in their neighborhoods. Another priority was providing breakfast for all the children in their communities, something just about everyone would agree is progress.
Not coincidentally, the 50s and 60s that saw a high level of organizing from underrepresented groups also saw the government try to break up these organizations, most notably via the COINTELPRO FBI program. This was a program that infiltrated, sabotaged, and surveilled political organizations they deemed “disruptive”. These were almost all leftist and/or black power movements, as well as a few white supremacist groups like the KKK. When the populace got more organized, and the country thus more democratic, the government’s response was to use the FBI to break up those organizations, making the country less democratic. This would be a surprise to someone who believes the government’s goal is to uphold democracy, but wholly unsurprising to someone who remembers the government was intentionally founded to prevent democracy. Every bit of democracy had to be clawed from the government, and system at large.
COINTELPRO’s greatest hits included this letter to MLK telling him to kill himself or they would release blackmail on him, and the assassination of Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton was a member of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, and its leader for the last year of his life. He fought for women’s place within the Black Panthers, and was having success getting gangs in Chicago to stop killing each other and work together to fight poverty instead. As with the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, just about any everyday person would see this as progress. To the government, he was organizing a group of people they didn’t want organized. In 1969, when Fred Hampton was only 21-years-old, the FBI had the Chicago police murder him.
The Long 70s: 1968-1979
The year before Fred Hampton was killed was the 1968 election, the first presidential election since LBJ signed the Civil & Voting Rights Acts. This had caused the rift in the Democratic party that was inevitable either way. Kennedy chose the black vote over the southern white vote, and left the latter up for the taking to the Republicans. Johnson was also unpopular because of Vietnam, so the Democrats had a tough road. It’s likely the best chance the Democrats had at winning was Bobby Kennedy, who became a Senator after his brother was killed. He was one of the first anti-Vietnam voices in the federal government, after supporting the war as Attorney General and advisor to his brother. He believed that winning the California primary would put him on the path to winning over the party delegates that entirely determined primaries at the time. He won that primary, and a few hours later, after speaking at a celebration rally, he was shot and killed. Hubert Humphrey was the nominee, and lost to Nixon.
Once again, as things were democratized during the 60s, certain people were upset about it and wanted to undo it. These people, combined with the capitalists who were still upset about the New Deal, created a conservative coalition that has dominated US politics ever since and made the US less democratic in the process.
The Kennedys siding with black voters, and the non-southern Democrats standing with Kennedy, left the southern white voters up for the taking if the Republicans could appeal to them. Barry Goldwater had tried this in 1964 but lost in a landslide. Nixon was the first to successfully run this “Southern Strategy” of appealing to white grievance over what they saw as preferential treatment of black people. When you’re the first Republican to win over people who were historically Democrats, they’ll be quick to abandon you if you don’t deliver. Nixon had to keep them happy.
One example was the War on Drugs. After the Civil War and the ostensible end of slavery, the Jim Crow era was established, with laws attempting to keep things as close as possible to the previous slave system, while still technically meeting the new laws. When Jim Crow was legally ended in LBJ’s term, the very next President did the same thing. In a way, Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs as an attempt to “Jim Crow” the end of Jim Crow. Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman said:
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
By giving black people excessive punishments for drug crimes, they could be sent to prisons for years and used as labor, since the Thirteenth Amendment still only applies when you’re not being punished for a crime. This creates a supply of very cheap labor that the economy always has demand for, facilitated by for-profit prisons. It’s also at the very least a happy coincidence to anti-democratic forces that disproportionately imprisoning black people increased the number of single black parents, making it harder for cultural problems to be solved in their communities.
During Nixon’s term, there was still a high level of political engagement, with the Vietnam War and its protests back home, and he also had a heavily Democratic Congress his (and Ford’s) whole term. This led to some gains for democracy, even as the War on Drugs had an anti-democratic influence. The voting age was dropped from 21 to 18 and the draft was ended, the assimilation policy of the US towards Native Americans was ended, and the creation of the EPA meant the air everyday people breathed was considered above corporate profits, to name a few. Despite COINTELPRO, the left was still organized in the early 70s, and those were the results.
But domestically, perhaps the biggest impact Nixon had was his influence on the Supreme Court. Nixon swung the Supreme Court from the Warren Court, the most liberal era of SCOTUS history, to a heavily conservative court by appointing 4 judges in his first term, followed by one appointed in 1975 by Ford after Watergate. The next year, Buckley v. Valeo was decided, and held that limits to campaign expenditures were unconstitutional under the First Amendment, because they claimed it would limit political expression. This decision made money a more powerful tool in politics.
Buckley v. Valeo would be followed up with First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978, using a similar argument, applied to corporations donating to ballot initiative campaigns. A long series of similar cases decided by conservative Justices would make it easier for money to influence politics.
In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote this memo that was circulated among business owners. It laid out the plan for how conservative elites could retake the US political system, after 4 decades of them losing power as the country became more democratic. It proposed things like creating/expanding lobbying organizations, especially the Chamber of Commerce; right-wing think tanks to craft narratives and write legislation (Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council); pro-business ideas spread over AM radio (Rush Limbaugh, and his many local imitators); TV/print media (Fox News, NY Post); and recruiting charismatic speakers to spread their ideas (Ronald Reagan). He also stressed that the judicial system was perhaps the most important tool of political power in the US. All of these suggestions would be followed over the 50 years that have followed.
The memo was a playbook on how to undo US democracy, and less than a year after he wrote it, Powell was appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court. He helped make decisions like Buckley v. Valeo and First National v. Bellotti, that achieved the conservative dreams he wrote about in the memo. This dream was fully achieved in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC, which basically completed the destruction of any campaign finance laws in the US, allowing unlimited corporate money to influence politics, as long as it went to PACs instead of the politicians themselves.
Nixon’s Supreme Court influence laid the groundwork to allow more big money into politics, which led to the surge of the right in US politics. That process, however, was briefly disrupted by Watergate. The election that followed Watergate saw a wave of activist-minded people elected to Congress, who had enough power to force changes to the government. These involved changing House rules to diffuse power throughout the chamber, instead of centralized in the hands of senior members, and increasing transparency, with video taping allowed in Congress for the first time.
These reforms, a few years after the Civil Rights successes of the 60s, and before Buckley v. Valeo, puts 1975 as the likely high-point of democracy in the US. However, the increased transparency of Congress had the effect of turning politics into a spectacle instead of a good-faith attempt to debate policy implications. The anti-Watergate energy only lasted until the election of Carter, though, who was powerless to stop the surge of money the Supreme Court was allowing. One midterm and one presidential election isn’t usually enough to swing the Supreme Court substantially, proving Lewis Powell’s emphasis on it wise.
* * *
The 70s was one of the most influential decades in US history, as well as recent world history. Following WWII, the US had it easy, as the rest of the industrial world had been destroyed by the world wars. They needed to rebuild, and the US was the de facto world leader in manufacturing, so there was plenty of demand for US, and the money flowed in. By the 70s, the rest of the industrial world had started to return to a degree that oil couldn’t be extracted enough to keep up with the increasing demand and got expensive. This moment marked a new world order, the US was no longer the de facto manufacturing hub, but it did have a highly-advanced economy, and was still the most powerful country militarily and diplomatically. It could and would use that power to secure oil, as energy quite literally runs the economy.
In 1971, Nixon ended the global economic system the US had put in place after WWII called Bretton Woods, ending the gold standard in the process. The oil shock mentioned came two years later. The new economic order that replaced Bretton Woods was the petrodollar, which, in the simplest terms, kept the US dollar as the global reserve currency, but backed up its authority with access to oil rather than gold.
As the western world got more on its feet, the Cold War began to turn. Communist uprisings throughout the Cold War were often native populations trying to overthrow their European colonial government, since the European countries were weak at the time.
“The left” domestically was and is mostly composed of labor unions and political organizations that usually weren’t communist. There were subversive groups, including communists, but most just wanted more equality, better working conditions, cleaner air, etc. The domestic left couldn’t be truly equated to Communists abroad for a number of reasons, chiefly that no country that went Communist ever started from a position remotely similar to the US. After the New Deal and post-WWII boom, most Americans had it too good to actually want to try a revolution, so the reformist energy was pointed in a more democratic direction. That didn’t stop the red scare movement from equating the two anyway.
To tell who US elites were more afraid of, look at which of the two “leftist threats” – Communist countries or leftists in the US – were prioritized by the political/economic system. Early in the Cold War, it was clearly Communist countries. The US military and CIA were involved in opposing just about every Communist movement abroad following WWII. The US had promised to defend the capitalist European countries after they were destroyed by the world wars, which provided the pretext for Cold War interventions.
The two largest Communist countries were the USSR and China. In the 70s, China was still not very industrialized, so the USSR had been the more powerful up till then. The two had began drifting apart ideologically and diplomatically in the 60s, but both backed the Vietcong. The end of the Vietnam War also ended the most meaningful common cause the USSR and China felt, and their divide grew. Within the USSR, the 70s began strong, but the economic shocks that the whole world felt sent their economy into a tailspin it would never come out of. Not only had the two largest Communist countries split, the largest had stagnated, and began declining economically.
The USSR led the USA for most of the space race, which is what drove Kennedy to invest heavily in NASA, effectively making the US space program more USSR-like. This allowed the US to be the first to land a person on the Moon in 1969. Capitalism’s market-driven economy wasn’t naturally good at doing such a thing, without a clear path to monetization. Pursuing innovations that are unprofitable but further humanity required a competing alternative abroad to motivate the US to do more central planning. Once that alternative was beaten, capitalism resumed pursuing profits and rents over dreams of creating a better world or exploring space. In summary, after it caused the great depression and WWII, capitalism was unpopular and had to win people over again, and the presence of an alternative abroad kept that pressure on until the 70s.
By the end of the 70s, the USSR was on its way out, largely from internal dysfunction, and capitalism had cornered the global market. Like a company that’s undercut their competition to put them out of business, then jack up prices, capitalism no longer had to treat people well to win them over. Having effectively won the Cold War by the late 70s, capitalism could turn its attention elsewhere. While it continued to fight against competition abroad, it increasingly turned to putting down the left domestically. Lewis Powell’s memo was the political playbook, but capitalists of course used their main source of power as well: economic power.
Economists have predicted for over a century that automation would lead to people working fewer hours, yet in the past 50 years, working hours have gone up during unprecedented levels of job automation. Somehow, more work is always created, but a lot of it seems to be effectively meaningless paperwork. The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber investigate this effect, and point to a critical shift funding for technology took in the 70s.
To a certain degree, a trade-off has been made, where workers are given better options for consumerism, instead of the expected decrease in working hours. However, the fact that so much of the work done in the US and other developed countries is more-or-less useless indicates that even with the increased consumerism of recent decades, Americans don’t need to be working as much as they are. If technology was focused on automating jobs, working hours would be lower today, but when people work less, they have more time to organize, which is exactly what capitalists don’t want.
Starting in the 70s, as the need to out-compete the USSR faded, technology research funding increasingly shifted towards things that allowed the elites to control people, primarily military funding. Today, many of the largest tech companies compete in getting people to click on ads, and collecting data that allows companies to best influence public sentiment.
If the STEM workers spent less time on such meaningless tasks, and instead spent time creating the technologies that allowed people to work less, we could easily have it down to 15 hours per week by now. That’s not what capitalists want, though, because workers with free time are harder to control. Once capitalism didn’t have to prove itself, money went to technologies that allowed the capitalists to control workers, and productivity gains were offset with meaningless paperwork to keep people busy. This effect would work its way into all facets of the economy, from education to the healthcare system, and it is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
Reagan thru Present
The influence from lobbying and think tanks took off in the 80s, and resulted in changes to tax codes and corporate regulations that almost all benefited capitalists. Reagan had a firmly Democratic House all 8 years of his presidency, and 2 years with a Democratic Senate. The pro-business changes were made in a bipartisan effort. This was clear by the 90s, when Clinton, who might as well have been a Republican, removed most of what was left of the New Deal after the Reagan/Bush years. This all makes sense, once money becomes a big enough influence on politics, wealthy people would be foolish not to try to buy both parties. Politicians have always been on the side of wealthy and powerful people, the only reason the government made pro-worker changes in the New Deal-Great Society era was because workers had organized themselves into large and powerful organizations, giving them more meaningful political influence than the right to vote alone represents. Those organizations made society more democratic.
In the 60s, those organizations were targeted by COINTELPRO in an attempt to break them up. In the 70s, the War on Drugs targeted the same groups. Union membership had dropped through the 60s and 70s, but dropped even more precipitously in the 80s, as Reagan’s National Labor Relations Board swung policy hard away from unions and towards business owners. This drop has continued ever since.
Repeatedly, the government has tried to break up powerful organizations, particularly the ones that benefit less privileged people like black and working class white people. These organizations make the country more democratic. Since sometime around 1975, the US has been shifting less democratic, and the intentional breakup of pro-democratic organizations has been a massive part of that. Divide and conquer.
By the 90s, the left had pretty much been crushed, both in the US with the breakup of labor unions and political organizations, and globally with the fall of the USSR. Capitalism took a victory lap, and the dot-com bubble made things look good for a little while, but the country continued to become less democratic. Increased War on Drugs enforcement and cuts to welfare harmed already-underprivileged communities. AM talk radio hosts and Fox News had started broadcasting a more divisive brand of politics.
This same brand was promoted by the first Republican Speaker of the House in 40 years, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich circulated this memo telling Republicans to use light, optimistic sounding words when describing something Republicans support, and using over-the-top language like “traitor” to describe Democrats, presenting them as an existential threat to the US. His goal was to turn politics nasty, and be the party that’s better at being nasty. Gingrich didn’t create polarization, but he did intentionally lean into it as a way for Republicans to gain power, and it worked. Polarization has been the Republicans’ game ever since, making Newt Gingrich one of the most influential people on modern US politics.
If you find yourself upset at the amount of division in the US today, don’t make the mistake of thinking it happened by accident. Conservative capitalist forces have been working hard to divide the US since the late 60s, and 30 years ago, the most powerful Republican at the time, Newt Gingrich, made it official Republican party policy to promote division. The division felt today is success in the eyes of wealthy elites, and is the latest in a long history of backlashes against any historically underprivileged group gaining more equality (in this case women, LGBT & minorities). The last post talks more about how this division has been promoted.
Government surveillance has increased as the country has gotten less democratic. Reagan, the supposed crusader against government overreach, started this by signing Executive Order 12333, giving the government more capability to spy on Americans. Following 9/11, the Patriot Act expanded government surveillance further.
Alongside the many Supreme Court decisions regarding campaign finance, there were other decisions related to voting laws that had huge consequences on the level of democracy in the US. In 2004, 5 Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices gave a decision in Vieth v. Jubelirer that a gerrymandered congressional district was not unconstitutional, thus giving the tacit go-ahead for further partisan gerrymandering, provided it helped Republicans. The next congressional district redraw was in 2010, and the Republicans had a highly-effective plan called REDMAP to prioritize winning as many state legislatures as they could, then gerrymandering those states to give Republicans more power than the voters wanted, making things less democratic.
The 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, letting a little Jim Crow back into US politics. This allowed more voter suppression to happen, usually in Republicans’ favor, through means like having fewer polling locations in Democratic areas, so they’re harder to get to and have long lines, and “accidentally” purging voter rolls, usually disproportionately black people, so that when they show up to vote they can’t even though they did register.
The Supreme Court has been majority Republican appointments since Nixon, and have played a crucial role in making the US less democratic in that time. Today, a majority of the SCOTUS (the 5 Republican appointments besides Roberts) have come through the Federalist Society, an organization created to help use the judicial branch to push conservative ideology. They recruit law students, help craft legal justifications for conservative decisions, and suggest judges for Republican presidents to appoint. Historically, some judges have been appointed by conservatives, but then become more liberal over their lifetime appointment, so another role of the Federalist Society is to give incentives (book deals, etc.) for their decisions to remain conservative.
It’s interesting to note that Merrick Garland, Biden’s Attorney General, came through the Federalist Society. In fact, he was originally nominated for SCOTUS by Obama after a Republican suggested it. Then, when Obama nominated him, Republicans chose to never even consider him, and instead shrink the size of the Court to 8. They then increased the size after Trump took office, back to 9, stealing a SCOTUS seat in the process.
Recently, there’s been some talk of Democrats growing the Supreme Court, and Republicans are predictably upset. On a practical level, it’s highly unlikely Democrats would do this, as they always find a way to prevent themselves from actually winning politically (see: the filibuster preventing a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act, or deferring to the Senate parliamentarian). On a rhetorical level, Republicans are selectively leaving out that if Democrats did grow the court, it would be the third time the 21st century the size was changed, and the first two were by Republicans. The hypothetical of Democrats doing the same to balance out the wrong caused by Republicans is not as bad as the Republicans actually doing it in the first place, purely for political gain. The current Supreme Court does not agree with most Americans on most issues, which means it’s not democratic. Then again, that was the point of the Supreme Court.
In 2015, the SCOTUS did throw the populace a bone with Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed gay marriage. The decision came from the 4 liberal Justices and Anthony Kennedy, the most liberal of the conservative Justices at the time, and was a move towards democracy.
Still, the general trend has been away from democracy. To see how far it’s gone, in 2021, the outgoing president attempted a coup to stay in power, and now he has a real shot at being elected again, while saying he’ll be a dictator. Republican-controlled states are passing laws to allow them to claim voter fraud and throw out votes, possibly overturning an election. US democracy is in bad shape right now, and it’s been foremost thanks to Republicans and capitalists. People whined about Nixon and Reagan because they, and many others, did make the US less democratic for the last 50 years, and the results speak for themselves.
The charts nicely compiled in this website show that repeatedly, economic factors took a turn for the worse around 1971 and/or 1981. Until 1971, wages had kept pace with increasing economic productivity from automation, but ever since, productivity has continued to increase while workers’ pay has stagnated. The share of the wealth going to the workers has gone down while the share going to the capitalists has gone up. This is exactly what you would expect to happen as a country becomes less democratic. Money was turned into political power, then the wealthy used this increased political power to give themselves even more economic power, further increasing their political power, in a feedback loop.
As more money and power concentrated in a few hands, they began buying up more and more land, making housing less affordable for the workers. This creates a way for wealthy people to extract more money from working people, via rent, without actually providing any value. In a word, it’s undemocratic.
The reason 1971 specifically was the turning point in many of these was because that was when the US got off the gold standard, ending the Bretton Woods system, the first of the several shocks to the system in the 70s discussed above. Still, the 50 years since didn’t have to continually get worse, that was a result of policy changes, and the decline of the organized left.
Education
One of the reasons the left was so strong in the late 60s-early 70s was thanks to college professors agreeing to automatically give all their students good grades, to prevent them from being drafted to go to Vietnam. This allowed the students more free time as they didn’t need to do school work, and some of them spent their time getting involved in political causes. Opposition to the Vietnam War was a big one, particularly since that was why their professors were auto-passing them, but the reform culture bled into other issues.
For this reason, education became a hot-button issue at that time, and has been another example where we can see the US becoming less democratic since. Equal access to education is critical in making a society more democratic, as education makes people more informed voters, gives them upward mobility economically, and gives them access to the types of connections, organizations, and societies that lead to more organizing. Keeping access to these advantages away from some is elitist, not democratic. In the 60s, higher education was affordable to most, if still discriminatory against women and minorities. In his 1966 run for Governor of California, Ronald Reagan’s campaign railed against the University of California system that was tuition-free to all residents at the time. In particular, UC Berkeley was one of the hotbeds of anti-Vietnam protests, and the main target of his ire.
Reagan won the election and attempted to impose a tuition on the schools, which would make them more expensive and less democratic, but was stopped at the time by the state legislature. This internal FBI memo stated that Reagan was “dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on California college campuses.” Disruptive elements of course meant the protesters. He eventually cut the state college budget by 20%, forcing the tuition increases he desired.
In 1970, Reagan’s education advisor, Roger A. Freeman made clear Reagan and Republicans’ goal of making education more exclusive when he stated, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go through higher education].” As President, Reagan would call for the dismantling of the Department of Education (DoEd) that was created at the end of Carter’s presidency, right before Reagan took over. He didn’t succeed, but the Department is still in Republicans’ cross-hairs, most recently with Trump calling for its elimination. During his presidency, Trump appointed Betsy DeVos, multi-level marketing billionaire & Republican mega-donor, to lead the Department of Education, which she said shouldn’t exist, and worked to dismantle. Her DoEd promoted school vouchers, a system designed to defund public education, and drive more students towards conservative Christian private schools, where history inconvenient to conservatives can remain untaught.
The DoEd was only one piece of the education puzzle, though. Reagan reduced funding to education by 25% during his presidency, and began the rise in college cost that’s continued until recently. State funding for higher education has also decreased in that time. The effect can be seen clearly in the following graph, showing inflation-adjusted costs were basically constant through the 70s, then after Reagan took over (green pointer), college began to become more expensive.
College becoming increasingly unaffordable, and thus less democratic, would look like a failure to everyday Americans, but to many of the decision makers along the way, like the minds behind the Reagan administration, it was them achieving their goal. After all, remember that Edmund Burke’s foundation of conservatism was opposition to democracy. Do you think conservatives want people exposed to enough history to learn that?
A big part of Republicans’ influence on education comes from Texas, specifically its State Board of Education, which approves textbooks to be used in their public schools. The Republican-dominated Texas is able to sway what gets put in textbooks, as textbook companies don’t want to miss out on sales in such a big state. This way, Republicans can export their conservative influence on what’s taught to other states. Recently, they were up to their usual ways by rejecting textbooks for mentioning solutions to climate change. Until 2019, they resisted teaching that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War.
In 2012, the Texas GOP explicitly opposed the teaching of critical thinking in schools, because its effect of “challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” Which…yeah, that’s the purpose of critical thinking. If actually reasoning about something you believe makes you change your mind, you should have been doing that reasoning. This is a good thing, but the Texas GOP said it was bad, preferring an education system that doesn’t make their students too good at thinking. This is basically the education-level analog of the “unbiased”-obsessed media: just state facts so simple and surface-level that no one actually learns anything meaningful from it, then pat yourself on the back for it.
As mentioned above, at the end of the section “The Long 70s”, capitalism got its hands on the education system and filled it with endless paperwork as it did the industrial and healthcare systems. This can be seen in the managerial bloat that causes much of the funding for “education” to go to people who aren’t educating. Just about any professor will tell you the job is all about getting grants now, and doing so involves appealing to what the people with money want to be funding. Wealth doesn’t only gain political influence, it gains influence over what direction technology and academic thought takes. There are a number of colleges and universities that have endowments large enough, with the managerial bloat to match, to be considered hedge funds that provide education as a form of PR.
Unsurprisingly, capitalists used their wealth to influence economic thought, by giving grant money to economists who espoused laissez-faire economics, or more often it’s modern descendent, “neoliberalism”. They even created a fake Nobel Prize for economics (really called the “Sveriges Riksbank [Central Bank of Sweden] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”) without approval from the Nobel family, 60 years after the real Nobel Prizes were created. One of the winners of the fake Nobel Prize was Milton Friedman in 1976. He was perhaps the biggest neoliberal economist of the time, and a key influence on Republican economic policy during the pivotal 70s.
It’s interesting to ask yourself “if the education system was being sabotaged by anti-democratic forces, what would that look like?” It’s not hard to see why such a group would want to sabotage the education system, as well-educated people would most often understand and oppose what they were doing. In particular, people who learned US history would realize the level of democracy the US enjoyed after the 60s was hard fought, not just given to people because American leaders were nice, or the United States was born uniquely free. The people who were upset those freedoms and rights were spread to all do not want you to know how they were achieved. This way, as they erode these freedoms, you won’t know how to counter them. Teaching history to people makes them understand the world they live in better, and to someone intent on controlling you, that’s a bad thing. It’s also why learning history is so important, which is why this post exists.
In short, economic elites want the education system to produce good workers, but “good workers” to them includes not being knowledgeable enough to know how to organize and fight for better treatment. Not teaching history well is one of the best ways to ensure this, and the other is to keep people divided, which makes organizing harder.
Thus, success in the eyes of capitalists would be keeping people fractured into a wide array of identity groups that talk past each other instead of uniting, to go with a poor grasp of history. You can judge for yourself if they’ve been effective at influencing the education system in this manner.
The media has also played a big role dividing people, which serves to make it less likely that Americans will organize in the fight to reclaim democracy. That was covered in-depth in the last post, so I won’t rehash it here. All these systems – education, media, politics – are interconnected, and have been heavily infiltrated by big money influences over the past 50 years. All have become less democratic as a result.
The Head of the Beast
Looking back, it’s hard to not see the game as won by the time Reagan was elected in 1980. Reagan was an obvious corporate puppet; he was a corporate shill for GE before getting into politics, and before that was an actor. His presidency solidified the Republican’s caucus via the Southern Strategy and bringing evangelicals into the fold, defining the party’s identity since. Lobbying and capitalist-funded think tanks exploded during his term, as Lewis Powell had called for the prior decade, in his memo explaining how capitalists could best make the US less democratic. Reagan attacked unions, further fracturing the organization of the everyday people, and shifted the tax burden away from the wealthy and on to the workers.
Most significantly, every president since from either party has been a corporate puppet in the mold of Reagan. The years since have seen some democratic wins on social issues, like gay marriage and women’s equality. As explained in the media posts that preceded this one, these issues are mostly window dressing to the capitalists, who would gladly trade them for anti-democratic changes on issues more foundational to their power. To this end, we’ve seen a reduction in voting rights, more egregious gerrymandering, less affordable education, less affordable housing, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, less of company profits going to the workers, and an attempt by the sitting president to overturn an election, with broad help from his party, the Republicans. These are all the types of things you would expect to see in a country becoming less democratic. The signs are there; just because Americans are still allowed to vote for politicians doesn’t mean the US hasn’t gotten less democratic in recent decades.
It’s important to remember that historically, a politician who isn’t influenced by wealthy/powerful people is extremely rare, it’s not like politicians were noble until Reagan came along. Instead, the left in the US was more organized, with labor unions and political organizations like MLK’s Poor People's Campaign, which built up power through the combined influence of many members. The existence of these organizations made it such that some of those powerful people influencing politicians were actually representatives of large groups of workers, while today it’s almost exclusively capitalists. Simply voting for the same party or candidate in a decentralized way doesn’t carry nearly the same weight as organizing those votes does. Organizations can threaten to withhold a large number of votes in unison, which unorganized individual voters spread across the country simply cannot. This is the type of nuance missed when the idea of democracy is flattened to something like “has elections”. The organization of society alone can change how democratic it is, without changing the underlying rules of how the government is run.
Really, Reagan was in the right place at the right time, not the guy who single-handedly broke US democracy, as some make him out to be. After political reforms following Watergate had turned US politics into more of a TV spectacle, who better for the capitalists to prop up as their candidate than an actor? In hindsight it almost feels inevitable, at least once the floodgates of money in politics were opened by SCOTUS decisions in the 70s. This moves the real turning point back to the guy who swung the SCOTUS to the right: Nixon. Had the 1968 election gone differently, the US today could be more democratic. Instead, Nixon won, and began the currently-ongoing slide away from democracy in the US.
It’s important to remember, though, that this wasn’t actually inevitable, because history never is. There are limits to what is possible in any society, but there are always choices to be made within those limits. When we study history, we trace a single chain of cause-and-effect, and it can be tempting to think the way it played out was the only way it could have, but a number of different paths are always possible. The US wasn’t guaranteed to end up where it is today by 1968 nor 1980, though both elections likely made the options of possible paths worse.
Instead, the US continued down the path Nixon and Reagan laid out for the same reason Nixon and Reagan were allowed to lay out that path in the first place: they were popular among voters. Of the four elections those two won, only the 1968 election was even remotely close, and Nixon still handily beat Hubert Humphrey 301-191. Both Nixon and Reagan won 49 states for reelection. The people who handily voted those two into office didn’t disappear when Reagan left office, they kept the US on the same path they decided with Nixon and Reagan. The US is where it is today because the politicians leading it there for the past 50 years were popular among the electorate.
Nixon’s approval never recovered after Watergate, but Reagan’s did after Iran-Contra, which was far worse than Watergate. Today, as the US witnesses wealth and income inequality increasing, cost of college going up as quality seems to go down, cost of housing increasing, and voting and civil rights being eroded, a man whose administration was trying to make all this happen gets celebrated. Instead of recognizing Reagan’s brand of politics has made the US less democratic and free, some people say that others have been saying that for decades and the US still has a democracy. The ones scapegoated for overreacting were at times the ones correctly predicting where the US would end up today.
Still, Nixon and Reagan were never the head of the beast, because politicians in general aren’t the head of the beast. The head is the well-organized mass of capitalists, both big time billionaires and lesser, more numerous millionaires many times over. Those people influenced Nixon to appoint the judges he did, then grabbed a hold of whatever political power they could once his SCOTUS loosened campaign finance laws and they got their guy Reagan into office. At times the electorate has formed an alternate head of power, provided they’re organized and/or numerous enough.
If you were one of the most powerful people in the country, would you want to be a politician? Would you even want most people to know who you are? That seems like a lot of risk, remembering power is a zero-sum game, so the most powerful often have the most enemies. One of the politicians’ roles in society is that of the lightning rod, seeming like the power-holders so the masses have someone to be mad at who isn’t the true power-holder. Politicians work for the real elites, who in the US are the capitalists (and at times labor unions & political orgs).
Making the US more democratic again will require organizing. The most obvious example is labor unions, which have had a growth in support recently in the US, but not a growth in membership to go with it. Labor unions, like all social organizations that persist long enough, can and do get corrupted. The solution is to fix the corruption, not get rid of unions entirely. Capitalists have more political power than simply their vote, thanks to money influencing politics; workers need something to counter-balance this, or capitalists’ oversized power will render workers’ votes alone useless. Unions are the most powerful form of representation workers have, and should be treated as such, rather than something to throw away when they require work. Corrupt unions are bad because they’re corrupt, not because they’re unions. Nearly every time, the ones causing the corruption are business leaders and other elites who want unions gone. Getting rid of unions due to corruption is giving the source of corruption what they want.
Unions, and political organizations capable of aligning many votes to create political pressure, are needed to make the US more democratic. Simply voting for the right politicians is not enough. Voting for the wrong politician, though, will make the country even less democratic, and prevent the public’s ability to organize to further democracy. The slope towards authoritarianism gets slipperier the farther you go, and the US has been headed down that slope for 50 years. This is why the first, but far from only, step is to vote out Republicans in this and future elections.
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Part II, found here, covers 2024 and beyond.